Canadian Business Blogs | Advice on Investment in Canada, Stock Market, Small Businesses Opportunities » Accoutability

Measuring CSR

Paul Klein — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:44:46 +0000

There was a good piece in yesterday’s Globe and Mail by Richard Blackwell called ” The double-edged sword of corporate altruism”. It discusses the importance of corporate social responsibility and also the challenge in measuring program performance – especially in today’s economic climate.

Tomorrow, I’ll be going to Ottawa to do a presentation for the Conference Board’s Community Investment Council. The session is entitled “Measuring and Evaluating Your Community Investment Programs” and I’ll be speaking about why community investment managers need to be prepared to demonstrate how their programs are contributing to their company’s business objectives and how to best do this.

Since 2001 when I founded Impakt, we’ve been focused on developing more effective ways of measuring the ROI of community investments as needed to increase internal accountability and improve program performance. Recently we launched the Impakt Partnership Valuation Tool – a management tool that’s the culmination of many years of work in this area and is unique in its ability to establish the value of partnerships with non-profits – usually the most conspicuous aspects of CSR programs.

Both the article in the Globe and the session at the Conference Board support the need for more effective ways of measuring the ROI of community investments.

Gaps in Corporate Community Investment

Paul Klein — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:04:08 +0000

Over the last 2 weeks, my colleague Jon Packer (President of The Idea Workshop) and I conducted workshops in Toronto and Vancouver for corporate community investment managers. Participating corporations included TELUS, Bell, Pfizer, Shoppers Drug Mart, RBC, and 3M among others. All major corporations with significant programs in this area.

We had 3 important learnings from these sessions:

1. Community investment managers need management tools to help increase their accountability for community investments. Largely managers in this area are flying blind and don’t have a way of demonstrating the value of what they spend in this area. This leaves them very vulnerable – especially during time when all budgets will come under scrutiny from executives.

2. While community investment (and other CSR programs) are now profiled in all existing internal communications and many external communications, employees and external stakeholders remain largely in the dark about what companies do in this area.

3. Managers are wrestling with how to evaluate the risk that’s associated with creating more profile for their programs. At our workshops we showed participants back-to-back videos of Dove’s remarkable Onslaught campaign (263,000 views on YouTube) and Greenpeace’s hard hitting response called Onslaughter (549,000 views on YouTube) that targets Dove’s use of palm oil in its beauty products.