2012 CSR Awards: A-List – APCO Worldwide

APCO Worldwide has a team of CSR professionals spread across 30 offices in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, helping clients in nearly every industry engage in a range of environmental, social and governance issues. APCO has developed nine principles for creating and communicating CSR strategies: understand stakeholder expectations; tie all CSR efforts to the business; think creatively about how your business can make a difference; be transparent across all CSR issues; audiences want to know about your CSR efforts; communicate internally and externally; humanize CSR communication; measure and evaluate CSR efforts. Putting these nine principles to work for client Microsoft, APCO helped tell the company’s complex global CSR story by revamping its Citizenship Web site with an interactive world map, adding more data and transparency to Microsoft’s 2010 and 2011 citizenship reports and creating government toolkits to help employees around the world speak with their local governments about the company’s citizenship. The results: All of Microsoft’s stakeholders now have a much clearer view of Microsoft’s CSR activities. —SG