What is strategic corporate social responsibility? Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR, is defined by Stanford University’s Graduate School of business as the following:
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is an organization’s obligation to consider the interests of their customers, employees, shareholders, communities, and the ecology and to consider the social and environmental consequences of their business activities. By integrating CSR into core business processes and stakeholder management, organizations can achieve the ultimate goal of creating both social value and corporate value.
As of late, CSR has gained noteriety as businesses have responded to two major changes in the last 5-10 years: the increase of public concern over the enviornemnt and the free flow of information afforded by the internet.
In the last several years, movies like An Inconvienient Truth and events such as Live Aid and Earth Day have brought climate change and protection of the Earth’s enviorment into the forefront of people’s minds. As stakeholders in any organization’s strategic plan, the public represents shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers- everyone. Whatever issues that the public sees as important, organizations should take notice of. An organizstion seen as harmful to the enviornment is very likely to be seen as socially irresponsible, and therefore risks the relationship with all of its stakeholders.
Another trend increasing the importance of CSR is the increased use of the internet to access and trade information. Whereas in the past, the details of a company’s actions may have been restricted to newspaper clippings from the business section or academic discussions in the classrooms of business schools, these days any company seen being socially irresponsible may show up in mass emailings, facebook postings or even myspace bullitens- seen by tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in a day. Today, more than ever, companies are under the watchful eye of their stakeholders.
So what is Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility? By taking a strategic approach, companies can determine what activities they have the resources to devote to being socially responsible and can choose that which will strengthen their competitive advantage. By planning out CSR as part of a company’s over all plan, organizations can ensure that profits and increasing shareholder value don’t overshadow the need to behave ethically to their stakeholders.
Does your organization employ Strategic CSR? If you would like to incporporate CSR into your strategic plan, feel free to check out more of our resources library, and if you need any help please let us know.
Topics in this post: corporate social responsibility, Strategic Planning Training |
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Thanks alot for the insight I have gained alot from your approach to CSR. My interest is on how to prepare an annual CSR plan for a state corporation that is not necessarily for profit making, just provision of public services such as water.
Thank you for the article. I have to propose a CSR plan for a fictive company during my studies. Could you maybe help me with how to start a CSR plan from scratch? I would reall appreciate your response.
Regards, Alexandra
Hi Alexandra, While I can’t draft a CSR plan for you, I can provide you with additional examples. Our company, M3 Planning, supports one charity a month with 10% of our net income. We have defined a criteria of what types of charities we choose to support. For example, we choose non-profits that support and help humans, rather than causes that are strictly environmental in focus. We strive to choose half of non-profits from international sources and half from domestic sources, because that’s where our customer base hails from. You can get more details about it from our page http://mystrategicplan.com/m3-planning-gives-back/.
I suppose I should also add the importance of defining an organization’s core values in setting a CSR plan. These core values determine what your organization will never do and serve as boundaries for employee behavior. For example, many organizations choose “integrity” as a “permission to play” value – meaning all employees must embody that corporate principle if they wish to keep their job. That means employees will never approve or allow unethical activities such as hacking into a competitor’s database even if it would yield short-term gains. Having those boundaries determined upfront can help protect organizations from running into public affair fiascoes or ruined stakeholder perceptions.
Some organizations go to great lengths building their CSR plan into the structure of their business. Tom’s is one of the best examples I can think of. For every shoe a customer buys, they donate a pair of shoes to a person in need. Read about it here.
The CSR strategy should encompass both an internal and external focus. I’ve worked with several companies on this so feel free to email me to chat!
I couldn’t agree more that both internal and external focuses are required for a comprehensive CSR plan.