(In just a short time, corporate social responsibility, or CSR, has climbed to the top of the business agenda. CSR presents senior PR executives with a tremendous
opportunity to enhance their value throughout the organization because they're often called on to start a CSR plan before the company's leadership has even had a chance to think
about integrating a CSR strategy. But there are significant challenges to embedding CSR into the company's DNA. In the first of a two-part series running in PR News, Susan
Nickbarg, a marketing consultant specializing in social responsibility, takes a closer look at the role PR executives are playing in CSR and how they can align it with it the
company's overall business goals.)
John Friedman, now in the public-relations department at the American College of Emergency Physicians (Dallas) and who previously
served as director of public affairs for Herndon, Va.-based Lafarge North America from 2001-2003, knows firsthand about building a CSR plan from the ground up.
He started to tackle CSR at Lafarge by selling up the idea that sustainability was fast becoming an industry standard. He and his team set out to develop environmental and
community outreach programs, and sustainability reporting, but he initially had to help sort out internal tensions and pressures on what steps to take with CSR to get to a
positive end result.
Friedman credits the people in operations who really embraced the concepts that community outreach and transparency were a powerful way to demonstrate good corporate
citizenship and to facilitate doing business well.
"I would sit late many nights in my office trying to figure out how to how to demonstrate the strategic value of our community relations programs," Friedman says. His cross-
department team of 18 professionals represented roles including environment and safety, human resources, finance and tax, marketing and strategy.
The team renamed itself the "sustainability network" and set about developing a program to make sustainability part of all business decisions. Friedman learned that while
anecdotal successes were often enough to convince plant and operational personnel, he had to talk MBA language to change senior management's perceptions about CSR from the alleged
soft nature of the program to one that provided a solid return to the company.
In one example, "a $12,000 donation of a new product to Habitat for Humanity resulted in $85,000 in orders from customers found through the partnership. Social value was
likewise enhanced," he says. "Once we tied our efforts to directly helping sales, the line managers became some of our strongest allies."
Here are 10 steps to launching a CSR program:
- Identify core competencies, needs issues and markets.
- Expand to embrace the full scale of the business operationally, starting with top priorities.
- Gain C-level commitment and support.
- Organize a set of operating values and principles into employee goals and performance.
- Organize task forces and matrix teams with dotted-line CSR responsibilities.
- Use a balanced scorecard approach, including CSR, in the decision-making process along such variables as price, quality and delivery.
- Monitor, report and develop sustainability reports around the GRI guidelines (http://www.globalreporting.org).
- Engage in CSR communications, and be transparent.
- Obtain stakeholder feedback throughout the process.
- Evaluate and re-evaluate CSR as a strategy tactic in the annual and long-term operating plans.
Communications execs must work in concert with the business managers and upper management to develop clear goals in terms of performance, financial, brand image, risk and
engagement, and they must aspire to evaluate and move the target forward every six months. This may mean cross-team ownership of results or cultural change-management processes to
reward decisions that meet profit and social value criteria together.
At Nike (Beaverton, Ore.), for example, CSR started in 1984 with the "Going the Distance" program, which began with one or two standalone community-affairs and environmental
programs.
Today, Nike's CSR program embraces 180 employees, combining a decentralized and centralized staffing model.
It includes a dedicated CSR department with a vice president of CSR and CSR roles within mainstream operations. The glue that holds the company together around CSR is a
culture that fosters innovation and strong CSR values, making it part of the "organizational DNA."
The end goal is to align company principles with performance in every aspect of the business. "We believe CSR is integral to our business, who we are, and who we should be,"
says Lee Weinstein, Nike's director of corporate communications. "[But] it is not easy. If we do CSR well, it should add to our bottom line. Ideally, in the future, every employee
will think of CSR as a natural way of doing work, just like operating a profitable company."
Lee and his communications team play a significant role in helping the CEO, board members, senior management team, workers, and vendors communicate with integrity and
transparency. Open to public view at http://www.nike.com (click the tab for responsibility) is a CSR mission statement; a sustainability report; a CSR e-newsletter; and case studies
on the environment, community, diversity, workers and factories, corporate governance and stakeholders.
Another way Nike integrates CSR is through worker alignment at every level: the board, executives, managers, non-managers and matrix teams and work areas keyed around the
same influencing principles: transparency, accountability, evolution, integration, integrity, engagement, and diversity.
An example of a CSR issue the matrix team recently tackled used a "balanced scorecard," meaning that along with price, quality and delivery, CSR was included in the decision-
making concerning organic cotton supplies. (Nike is the largest world retail organic cotton purchaser with approximately three million pounds of organic cotton fiber, according to
Organic Exchange 2002 estimates.)
Rather than dominate the supply chain when it strove to increase the percentage of organic cotton in its products, Nike chose to bring an industry consortia together to
increase the world's supply of organic cotton.
According to projections for the 2004 retail year, approximately 30% of all Nike apparel cotton materials contained some percentage of organic cotton.
As such, 47% of all cotton-containing Nike apparel garments was manufactured with materials containing a minimum of 5% certified organically grown cotton.
This example demonstrates how large multi-national companies have approached CSR. However, the rich benefits of CSR apply to companies of all sizes regardless of how it is
integrated throughout the company.
(In Part II, Nickbarg explores how smaller organizations can use CSR as a business driver.)
Contact: Susan Nickbarg serves on the Steering Committee and is board-member-elect for the Washington, D.C., Sustainable Business Network. She also is vice-chair/Sponsorships
for Women in Technology. She can be reached at 301.588.6430, [email protected].