FabianPattberg.com

The question from my last poll was whether you thought that CSR / Sustainability activities where influencing your decision which product to buy or not to buy. This is the link to the post about the poll question.

The Result
The result (details in the chart below) show that the users that answered this poll where strongly influenced by the CSR / Sustainability practices by the company (58% of votes). They where also willing to pay more for these products at the same time.

But this result also shows that there are also significant doubts when it comes to the price of the product in question. 29% percent of the people that voted where price conscious first and then looked at the CSR / Sustainability practice of this company once they agreed that the price was what they wanted to spent.

What Does this Result Mean?
Obviously we need to take into account that the majority of the audience that answered are in some way of the other more sustainability conscious then the general public. This is just the nature of my network of people to whom I asked this question and this means that the audience was a little biased towards the “Yes” answer.

So taking this into account what is the learning from this poll?
It is fair to say that our purchasing decisions are increasingly influenced by the CSR / Sustainability practices. Why would anyone for example not buy from a company that took extra care of their employees and suppliers, was open takes actions to minimize its environmental impact and communicated in an open and honest way with their stakeholders.

But and this is a HUGE but, the deciding factor for every consumer is whether this product from the more responsible company is not more expensive then the comparing brand.

This is in my opinion the main reason for companies to not advertise their CSR / Sustainability practices more. Because it so far does not sell more then doing it the way it has always been done. This is very sad but reality unfortunately.

I have not been conducting one of polls for several weeks now so I thought it was a good time to start a new poll running all of this week.

This time on the question whether the CSR / Sustainability activities and practices of a company actually influences your decision as a consumer to buy or not to buy a certain product/ products of a company.

Please either vote below or visit http://twtpoll.com/s5rsdy to vote. As always no registration needed. Just click and vote.

Last week I started a poll on the question what you thought would be the best term for responsible business practice.

In total we had 117 votes with a result which was surprising to see in my opinion.

The most popular term with a total of 25 votes was Corporate Responsibility (CR) (21%) followed by Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) (21 votes, 18%), then Corporate Sustainability (19 votes, 16%), Corporate Citizenship (18 votes, 15%) and Sustainability with 14 votes and 12%.

Here are the results in a pie chart format:

So what can we take away from this result?

One point is crystal clear in my opinion. Responsible business practice is still being associated with too many different terms.

I think there are two different interpretations of this result:

Good development: This is good as it shows that different people and cultures have different terms to express responsible business practice. And different terms do not mean different things for these people just that companies need to be more responsible.

Confusion: This is not a good development as the usage of so many different terms just confuses everyone. This result is a sign of this.
In order to limit this confusion one or at most two terms should be the preferred terms to be associated with responsible business practice.

I personally only use the term Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Sustainability but this seems to vary most individuals and therefore believe that the second interpretation is more fitting.

Maybe this is a good thing as well? I am not so sure.

What do you think about these results? How do interpret them?

This week I am conducting another poll on an interesting question relating to Sustainability / Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). This is the question for this week:

I am conducting a poll every two weeks at the moment and last week I asked on Twitter what question my followers would like to have a poll on. Elaine Cohen had a really good question. She was curious what people where thinking about whether CSR Reporting should become mandatory for companies or not.

I really liked the idea and went straight ahead and used it as my poll question of the week.

Here are the results of the poll:

This is the direct link to the poll: http://twtpoll.com/na3igg

So what is the message from this poll?

The indisputable message here is that CSR reporting should be mandatory for companies.

84% are saying this. But the most interesting aspect is that there is a split between people demanding reporting for all organizations (44%) and people only demanding this for large and middle sized companies (40%).

I am interpreting this result in this way that reporting should be mandatory but a differentiation between small companies and large/medium sized companies is needed.

But what should this differentiation be? Maybe that small companies should either not have to report or have the choice to report? Or is there another differentiation you can think of?

I am conducting another poll this week as part of my series of interesting questions on the current Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) issues.
The poll question this week is:

This is the link to the poll: http://twtpoll.com/na3igg

There is no registration necessary just visit the poll, let us know what you think and what your opinion is. The current voting results will be shown instantly. We currently already have 40 votes and the result looks to be interesting indeed.

I will write about the results next week here if you are interested in the results once the poll closes on Saturday morning.

Is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) a management fashion or just a temporary movement in the business world that no one really believes in? – This is what I asked myself last week and decided to do an online poll about it to find out what the view of other people on this is.
I decided to have the poll run for a week to get enough participants for a meaningful result. And I was pleased to see lots of people participate. In the end we had 141 votes and a lot of comments.

Here are the numbers:

The majority of participants believe that CSR is not a management fad but something more then that (53% and 75 people). But I guess it is even more significant to note that 40% or 56 people believe that CSR is just a management fad and nothing more.

Here are the comments to give you more context of the reactions:

This is the direct link to the poll and the comments if you would to see the results and comments combined:
http://twtpoll.com/acq1ev

So what are the results telling us and what am I taking away as learning from this poll?
The results in my opinion show a very high degree of uncertainty and skepticism on whether CSR is something other then a management fad. This is even more remarkable as it is fair to say that the audience I engaged in this poll knows what CSR is (some even are CSR Managers in different organizations) and are as a consequence more likely to believe that it is not a management fashion.

My Learning
The majority of people participating in the poll do not think that CSR is a management fashion, however I was surprised by the number of people who are still skeptical towards the concept of CSR, even though the audience participating in this poll are most likely to be people involved in CSR in some way or another. I guess it is fair to say that even the CSR community is still unsure as to whether CSR is viewed as an intrinsic part of doing business by those who claim to be responsible.

I think the way I interpret these results is that we still might be a long way from and making it a way of doing business rather than a PR stunt, however we are on the right path and more and more people see the value CSR can bring to an organization’s long-term sustainability.

Do you agree with this assessment? Or do you think there is another interpretation of these poll results?

I will now start weekly polls on some Sustainability and CSR topics. I always wanted to do to polls on a more regular basis and then blog about it. So I thought, why not start this week? So I did.

This week’s poll will be on the following question:

The poll is closing on Saturday and I will write a blog entry about the result the following week.

Please participate (no registration required) and feel free to make suggestions for some future polls.

THIS POLL IS NOW CLOSED. Please visit this post to see the results: http://www.fabianpattberg.com/2009/08/csr-still-has-a-lot-to-prove-%E2%80%93-results-of-my-recent-online-poll/