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What is the value of a CSR conference when the audience is too specific?

December 15, 20111:19 pm

If you are in Berlin, Germany today and tomorrow you might be interested in the annual international CSR conference called »CSR – Social Responsibility in International Dialogue« organised by the German government. This is the Twitter hashtag if you want to follow some tweets about the conference: #CSRGermany.

A few weeks ago I discussed the value of this conference with a CSR friend of mine and to my astonishment we agreed that it would be necessary to attend, but only really if you are looking to do business in the CSR sector. The continuing conversation made it very clear that it would be incredibly boring and useless to go for anyone not part of the CSR business community.

What is the purpose of a CSR conference?

Hang on I thought. But is that really useful? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Surely every normal citizen should be the target audience for this kind of CSR conference. And certainly the conference should not be a gala for companies working in the field and the so-called CSR specialists looking to network and to acquire new business. CSR in my view is for everyone not just the people that work in the field.

But the sad reality still is that CSR continues to be a topic for specialists and not the main stream stakeholders.

This also shows that CSR in Germany is still a topic for the specialists and these specialists seem to want to stay amongst themselves as well……. Normal stakeholders still do not seem to show an interest in the CSR topic. Maybe this is an indication that the way we communicate CSR is still wrong? But this is a topic for another post so lets get back to the topic today.

What value do you see in visiting conferences in the CSR sector? Would you go even if you where not working in the sector or would this put you of?

My wish for CSR conferences in the future, is that they should be open and more importantly interesting to anyone working AND wanting to know more about CSR and the role of business in making the world a better place. Is this just wishful thinking and am I being just too idealistic?

A real shame: Some great upcoming Sustainability / CSR conferences but no livestream

October 28, 201011:34 am

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I know what I would love to do the next one and a half weeks. Starting today I would be attending the NetImpact Conference in Michigan until Sunday and then fly to New York to get to the BSR 2010 conference starting on the 2nd of November.

Unfortunately I can not attend. I, like many others I believe, have a lot of other commitments for this time period but at the same time are highly interested in listening to and watching several speeches and sessions via a livestream. We in Europe would be an ideal target audience for this kind of livestream because we could participate online during the evenings our Europe time (I am living in the UK and the time difference would make this possible).

But there is no such possibility to do so with these really interesting upcoming events. And this is a real shame.

Conference organizers are missing a trick here in my view
Imagine the scenario that NetImpact or BSR would provide a fairly inexpensive livestream ($150-300 USD) for some selected sessions during the conference such as the key note speeches and Q&A sessions. I am not asking for a live feed for every session but just the ones that have the best global appeal.

Financially this livestream possibility could also be very lucrative for conference organizers in my view. They might not be able to charge vast amounts of money as they do for the actual participants (which is another topic for a post) but from what I know is the Return on Investment (ROI) for online participants at the rate mentioned above is not really something I would turn down as a conference organizer. In my view conference organizers at these two conferences are really missing a trick here. Both financially and in terms of participation.

It can be done – Sustainable Brands 2010
This kind of online conference participation can be done as some other conference organizers have shown this year. One example was the 2010 Sustainable Brands conference which had this possibility of a live stream. I used this and I really enjoyed it.

We are living in exciting times when you look at the technology we already have at our disposal. It is therefore a shame that these two leading conferences do not provide and even attempt to engage a wider audience via this online participation even though we now have the technology at fairly inexpensive costs to do so.

This is my view on this and I hope some of the leading conference organizers will follow the examples of the last Sustainable Brands conference in 2010 and try to embrace the new age of technology by providing a livestream.

What is your view?

Picture Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/4389124180/

Day 1 of the Global Reporting (GRI) Conference

May 26, 20109:03 pm

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I arrived in Amsterdam for the GRI Conference yesterday expecting to connect with many likeminded people and to pick up the latest trends and opinions on Sustainability and CSR.

This is the first of three posts I will do this week covering this conference.

Impressions from Day 1 (A more detailed report will follow during the later stages of this week):

In general the mood of conference organizers, sponsors, speakers and participants I talked to seems to be a good and constructive one. The conference is now sold out and despite the economic downturn Sustainability/CSR professionals still find this conference highly useful, for them and their business. The venue is good and a lot of the key players in the field are attending.

Integrated reporting seems to be the major theme here from what I can tell after the first day. Everyone is talking about it here and some of the plenary session speakers today really went into detail about it. GRI also announced that it would fully support a move to integrated reporting. So does the organization supported by the HRH the Prince of Wales- Accounting for Sustainability. These are two heavyweights in terms of Sustainability / CSR opinion and this for me is a clear sign that integrated reporting will be a key area of work for GRI in the coming months.

Twitter is making the conference very interactive. There was one point half way through the plenary session where I counted something like 14 different people tweeting on a regular basis throughout the day when I searched for the #griconference hashtag on Twitter. This is a sign of the future to come with regards to stakeholder engagement at these kind of events. Two years ago this kind of engagement would have been unthinkable. GRI also provided free Wifi which was great to foster communication via Twitter. Tomorrow we will hopefully see the continuation of this online engagement.

In summary:
Day 1 of the conference was really interesting. But Day 2 will hopefully be even more interesting. Now we are going into the individual discussion panels and topic specific presentations.
So stay tuned for coverage of Day 2 tomorrow evening or follow the live tweets on Twitter with the hashtag: #griconference. This is the direct link to all the tweets from the conference. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=griconference If you prefer to follow individual Twitter users attending the conference then you will find a list of these participants here: http://www.fabianpattberg.com/2010/05/people-twitter-attending-gri-csr-conference/

Four CSR developments I identified at the last conference

May 6, 20104:10 pm

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The Responsible Business Summit (RBS) ended yesterday and I was privileged to be part of this interesting conference. The last two days helped me to get a feeling about some of the major developments within the Sustainability / CSR field.

This is the link to a previous post about my impressions of the first conference day. Day 1 of the RBS 2010 if you are interested in the first day in particular. The second day was equally interesting but very different as there were only so called “break out sessions” on a wide range of Sustainability / CSR topics. I attended several of these break out sessions. My aim was to find these topics which included elements such as trust, social media and leading CSR best practice.

At the end of the conference I tried to identify several interesting developments which I wanted to share with you. Here they are:

The Sustainability / CSR agenda within organizations is changing. It is moving into the mainstream but only really slowly. Why? Well, there are individual companies such as GSK, BAT, Tesco, etc. with engaging and groundbreaking best practice. But the problem here is that 85% of all other organisations do not know much about the topic of CSR / Sustainability and most of them have no idea about how CSR / Sustainability can enhance their business. I feel that this is still a worrying sign and continues to represent a lot of work for us as Sustainability / CSR professionals.
Sustainability / CSR professionals nowadays are distributed mainly across two geographic areas. North American and Europe. But what about the rest of the worlds participation in this field? This is a big issue i. I almost feel as if Sustainability / CSR is now a profession for the Western world predominately.
The trend is going towards online conferences to supplement offline conferences. Ethical Corporation has done a great job with the speaker list and organization. But it seems to me that online conferences will be the fast growing tool to engage with other practitioners in the future. The latest example is the upcoming SustainabilityNow next week.
Trust remains the big topic in the field. Trusting organizations to do the right thing has been seriously undermined with the failures in the banking sector and its corporate malpractice. It will be interesting to see the development of trust once we are out of the economic downturn and organizations are looking to reach out to stakeholders more instead of purely focusing on organizational survival.

These are four of the developments I have observed. Any comments on these and whether you agree, disagree or would like to add points?

Responsible Business Summit 2010 – Impressions from Day 1

May 5, 20107:16 am

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The purpose of this post is to be a reflection of my impressions of the first day attending the 9th Responsible Business Summit hosted by Ethical Corporation here in London yesterday. The participants list promised some interesting discussions and I was looking forward to connecting with Twitter friends such as Mallen Baker, Scheubel Develop, Lumina CR, James Farrar as well as many other friends and former colleagues.

What are my main impressions from this first day?

The overall impression I got from the corporate and consultancy participants was that business is difficult at the moment and everyone is feeling this negative effect in their area. Businesses and individuals. I doesn’t matter whether you are in the the steel industry or telecoms business. The recession has hit business hard and CSR activities, budgets and headcount took a hit too.

This just reinforced my feeling that CSR and Sustainability is at a cross-roads at the moment. There are these companies that are still very successful and are going from strength to strength. This is usually the first line when you talk to people from the corporate CSR world. But once you start getting into the more detailed conversations I found that there are equally as many companies that have to make very tough decisions with regards to what CSR / Sustainability activities. The theme is scaling down and business process optimizing. As a consequences many practitioners pointed out to me that these are decisions that will inevitably effect the innovation capabilities within the CSR / Sustainability field and its best practice.

And this this seems to be an important aspect. The overall popularity of CSR and Sustainability is rising when you look at the big picture but at the same time best practice innovation is stalling. This is what I could tell from my conversations and discussions throughout the day. I have not come across the innovative initiative or strategy that really wowed me so far. It seems to be business as usual as far as I can tell. CSR and Sustainability know what they need to do but so far I am missing the strong will and attitude to achieve change within the industry. Everyone is doing business as usual but not more unfortunately.

In later conversations during the day I exactly pointed this out to Mallen Baker and James Farrar just to name two people also present on Twitter. They agreed to a certain degree to my assessment but also pointed out that this might be the perception and feeling of people who have been working in the CSR Sustainability field for quite a while now. Which I have obviously. We (the CSR / Sustainability professionals) might be to saturated with best practice to not appreciate the innovation currently happening in the field. I had to admit that this made sense to me.

What is your opinion on this? Are the people that have worked in this field for several years not able to see the really valuable new best practice out there? Any feedback would be very useful as always.

Let’s see whether the second day will provide me with a different impression. So stay tuned for more from me this week.

The New Age of Sustainability Conferences?

May 11, 200911:24 am

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The conference „The Responsible Business Summit“ is currently happening in London (Today and tomorrow).

Why is that of interest?

Well because a lot of people from all across the globe have a chance to meet up, network, do/participate in workshops and give/listen to interesting speeches. All in all very useful. But the problem with this is that the admission fees are very high and for people without a large corporate background (like most people) not affordable.

The new development in my opinion is that non participants of the conference (such as myself) now can get a good insight of what is going on by following updates of conference participants via Twitter.

Here are two people and the events organizer that are well worth following to get interesting updates from this conference today and tomorrow:

David: http://twitter.com/davidcoethica

Aaron: http://twitter.com/AaronQFu

Ethical Corporation: http://twitter.com/ethical_corp

This is the new age of Sustainability conferences and technology and social media can help bring Sustainability to the next level by bringing more and more people together. This is a good sign.