Building a Business Case for CSR
By Linda Locke, Reputare Consulting Is there a real business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR)? In the Journal of Business Ethics, a study using membership in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, showed that corporate social performance may explain stock prices better than traditional financial measures.
And another article in the Journal of Brand Management concludes that brand value is more sensitive to CSR than traditional financial measures. If brand building is central to your organization, CSR activities can be very helpful in bringing measurable return.
Together these studies provide theoretical frameworks and empirical analyses that will help a communicator build a business case for a company to engage in strategic CSR activity, and to tell its story to stakeholders about its value to society.
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Is the survey mechanism broken? Frank Ovaitt, IPR President & CEO, recently posed this question to the IPR community. Minutes later, a thoughtful dialogue emerged with the nation's leading public relations educators and practitioners commenting on the reliability of today's surveys. Dr. David Michaelson, IPR Research Fellow, wrote that response rates are often the least of the issues facing this discipline. "The limitations of survey research include the lack of standards that are applied in designing and executing research that is valid and reliable. Many survey instruments are poorly constructed and the data collection methods are typically far from reliable."
"We can all realise, opinions tend to be much more volatile than in the past and clients are not so interested in us being able to change opinions of stakeholder groups if these opinions are not correlated to subsequent behaviors," wrote educator Toni Muzi Falconi. "This creates many complex consequences on the reliability of survey results."
What do you think?
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