Implementable Strategies and Tactics
However hard an organization strives to meet high CSR standards, that effort can be squandered if targeted publics do not know of this accomplishment as evidence of the organization’s commitment to CSR. Reputation, crisis response, relationship development and other benefits of public relations depend on how well it can communicate about an organizations’ CSR performance.
Fundamentally, public relations practitioners can and must bring discussions of CSR into management decision making to refine and implement mission/vision statements, budgeting, performance standards, and a philosophy or culture of working for a fully functioning society that defines and supports the organization. It must engage in outside-in thinking, issues monitoring, by which it aids other disciplines as well as brings its own expertise to play on knowing the standards expected by various stakeholders. It must engage with other voices to discover, consider, evaluate, and implement facts and opinions that individually and collectively advance the common good. Finally, it must not only help to create and define the culture of CSR excellence internally, but also report the organization’s achievement and commitments externally. Finally,
Specific action steps identified by Werther and Chandler (2006) and discussed by other authors offer short-term strategies including top down commitment, the creation of a CSR framework, CSR position statement, CSR ombudsman, CSR audit and report, and awareness creation. After these basic conditions are created, organizations may engage in more long-term strategies such as stakeholder involvement, corporate governance, and managing key messages. Not all of these strategies should or can be managed by public relations practitioners—but they can add value to internal discussions and planning and are essential to external communication.
Short-term Strategies:
- Top down commitment: The integration of CSR into an organization’s operational culture should start with top management, preferably the CEO (or the other top organizational leader such as a vice president of corporate responsibility), who should collaboratively establish the necessary components of an effective CSR policy and institutionalize it within the firm—and use the standards for the assessment of individual, unit, and organizational effectiveness. To this end, the leadership must take a stakeholder perspective rather than input/output approach to strategic management (Donaldson & Preston, 1995).
- CSR framework: Structural support for CSR is needed. CSR should be at the same executive level as other key corporate governance issues. To gain visibility and sponsorship, ideally a CSR officer position should be taken by a company executive and must be backed by the CEO.
- CSR position statement: This statement, with the CEO’s active support, should involve the organization’s key stakeholders and their perspectives and contain a conflict resolution process that seeks mutually beneficial solutions. It also provides practical guidance by reinforcing the importance of CSR through rewards and sanctions and by specifying how CSR is to be implemented on a day-to-day basis. From a business perspective, Hess, Rogovsky and Dunfee (2004) suggested that the CSR process needs to connect to the company’s core values and core competencies, the response to moral pressures, and set clear objectives and means of measurement.
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CSR audit: CSR audit with published results will further awareness among interna
l and external stakeholders. Using survey methodologies in consultation with stakeholders has been considered an effective method (Jackson & Bundgard, 2002) in this procedure. One of the earlier efforts in public relations to facilitate the CSR auditing process was reported by J. Grunig (1979) who used situational theory to explain communication behavior and attitudes of publics arising around issues of CSR. Essentially that study helped managers to select certain social issues for attention and auditing as well as to devise a communication program to inform publics about responsible corporate acts.C -
SR annual report: This report should incorporate triple bottom line thinking: financial, environmental, and social performance. For an “ideal” CSR report, Middlemiss (2004) suggested the following: ◦Takes account of the demand (stakeholders) and not of the supply (company).
◦Focuses on management systems and doesn’t list too many detailed indicators.
◦Doesn’t consist of more than 50 pages and is complemented by the internet and special publications.
◦Reveals its key messages within, at most, 30-minutes reading time.
◦Is written in a business like fashion and sparsely illustrated. - Financial report (report to shareholders or donors/followers): Financial stakeholders appreciate firms’ ability to generate profits in ways that demonstrate preferred standards of responsibility. Some mutual funds are designed and managed to feature CSR standards to justify why organizations deserve investment dollars. Such claims are strengthened when they demonstrate how improved ethical standards increase profits, especially by avoiding increased amounts of regulatory constraint, limiting legal liability, increasing market share, or operating efficiently. Sometimes, companies realize that by improving their engineering standards, for instance, they can use more of the feedstock materials they purchase while reducing environmentally damaging wastes and emissions, thereby avoiding unnecessary regulatory constraints. Companies can tout the reduction in raw materials used, improved processes to lessen environmental impact, lowered accident rates, and other practices that mark financial and ethical improvements. They can avoid crises associated with discoveries such as child labor practices, sweatshop conditions, and economic colonialism.
- Online Reports: Printed reports have traditionally been circulated to tout an organization’s CSR standards and accomplishments. Many printed documents never get circulated or only reach those who are not particularly interested in such reading. Today, many organizations place such reports, or at least summaries of such reports with the full report available by link, on their home pages. In this venue, organizations tout their standards of CSR with text and even pictures (including video). Rather than languishing on shelves of public relations practitioners, online versions are available 24/7. The interested reader can even follow links to find additional comments by organizations that positively comment on the focal organization’s standards and achievements. Links can be used to bridge between a business and its non-profit partners in CSR. It is wise as well to continually report on progress and be willing to combat against unsupported or biased claims to the opposite. This online venue can allow for CSR accomplishments to be attached to related messages such as marketing and organizational history.
- Employee communication: Another means for communicating corporate responsibility lies in the array of vehicles, including executive statements and the intranet, used to reach employees. Organizational culture is vital to the way employees conduct themselves and perform their work. This culture is crucial to the ability of an organization to achieve CSR (Hosmer, 1991).
- Advertising and other promotional options: These tools can integrate CSR claims into product and service advertising, as well as arguments by government agencies for funding and by nonprofits for fund-raising. Such claims demonstrate how an organization’s actions truly benefit its stakeholders.
- CSR ombudsman: This position serves as a key component of the continuous internal reinforcement necessary for an effective CSR policy.
- Awareness creation: Rewards and measures are key in creating an organizational culture that is sensitive to CSR. Many articles report that key stakeholders are less aware of CSR performance than the sponsoring organization should prefer.
Medium to Long-term Strategies:
- Stakeholder involvement: Here public relations practitioners can, for instance, change the focus from financial reporting and investor relations to include social issues and relationship building with all key publics. Smith (2003) indicated that such stakeholder engagement should be at the core of designing any CSR strategy. Lack of awareness about a firm’s obligations to its stakeholders can produce a legitimacy gap. Therefore, stakeholders’ engagement is more likely to lead to informed management thinking and decision making. Given the foreseeable difficulties in this process (such as a lack of skill set and openness of the management), diverse perspectives of stakeholders and management, and the unwillingness of certain stakeholder groups to engage in such a dialogue, some firms hire talent from the non-profit sector.
- Corporate governance: Transparency and accountability are the key words. Shareholder activism is increasing and drives reform in the area of corporate law.
- Manage the message: Strategic CSR requires that stakeholder expectations are met in reality and that excessive self-promotion should be avoided otherwise CSR efforts fail to demonstrate the other interest or mutual interest orientation needed.
- Measure social performance: Smith (2003) suggested developing appropriate metrics, essentially benchmarks for measuring social and environmental performance and goal setting.
- Communication strategy guidelines: Framing strategies for communicating about corporate responsibility, Sims (1992) offered the following sage bits of advice: (a) Be realistic and do not promise what the organization or industry cannot deliver, (b) encourage organization or industry-wide input into the standards and the best means for accomplishing them (as well as the stumbling blocks), (c) allow diversity, (d) allow whistle-blowing, (e) provide ethics training, (f) recognize the ambiguity that is inherent in ethical standards and their implementation, and (g) integrate ethical decision making into employee and operating unit appraisal.
Summary: The CSR Ethics of a Fully Functioning Society
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Public relations is ideally positioned to help organizations make communities more fully functioning because of its close interdependency with CSR. CSR is the means by which an organization is good first as a foundation for being an effective communicator. Organizational culture and character count. Both as a “listener” and communicator, public relations can aid organizations’ ability to foster mutually beneficial interests proactively as a problem solver rather than reactively as lessons learned.
The constructive role of public relations in CSR planning, implementation, and communication simply must be reflective (van Ruler & Vercic, 2005; see also, Black & Hartel, 2004 and Holmstrom, 2004). One size of CSR does not fit all. In such matters, “it depends” is not a stumbling block but a foundational principle.
Kaynak
By Robert L. Heath and Lan Ni
University of Houston
September 25, 2008
http://www.instituteforpr.org/topics/corporate-social-responsibility/
