I wanted to wish everyone a very Happy New Year and a successful 2012.
Let’s all work together to advance Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) awareness and best practice in our world!
Although pessimism surrounds some predictions for 2012, I am sure we can make 2012 a year to remember with regards to Sustainability / CSR.
So let’s get to it!!!!!
Todays post is the third in a series outlining a structured organizational stakeholder engagement approach companies and individuals can follow as well as use as a tool to improve their stakeholder engagement activities.
If you missed the first two posts please visit either of the links below:
These are the next two stakeholder engagement steps:
Step 7: Properly define and plan the in-house engagement process
During this step, your priority is to properly define and plan the process of engagement with your set of priority stakeholder groups. In the example from previous two posts we identified three key stakeholder groups for our exemplary organization. The reason for this identifying your key stakeholder groups is obvious. You need to know your target audience in this engagement phase. If you do not know your target audience at this point (or any other time of course), your engagement will fail. This is my experience.
When tackling the planning of the in-house engagement process, make sure you talk to your stakeholder champions (from within your business) and your marketing department. This is a good time to involve the marketing for very first time. I would advise against using them in an early point of the process as they usually complicate things (!). Your marketing experts will enable you to brand your engagement the way you need to from an organizational brand point of view in order to engage your stakeholder with one brand identity. From my experience this process of alleging your branding with your engagement might take a little longer. But spending this time is important in my view since this will be your first proper stakeholder engagement. And you will not get many chances to make a good first impression with the external stakeholder representatives.
Step 8: Invite the stakeholder groups to a stakeholder day
Once your plans in-house are finalized you can tackle the next big step in your stakeholder engagement. The, as I call it “stakeholder engagement day”. This day should be a formal event with representatives from your key stakeholder groups. Focus on the stakeholders which you identified as important for the start of your engagement ( step 7 and the previous post for details)
While preparing for the event try to structure the agenda in that way that you have formal sessions with interesting speakers but more importantly, leave at least 50% of the event time to specific stakeholder conversations or groups discussions so that that each stakeholder group will get their time with senior executives and their stakeholder managers.
On the event day you need to focus on facilitating conversations and gathering as much feedback as possible, written and via personal conversations. Make sure you have assigned enough people to care for your stakeholders. You do not want to have anyone standing around not engaging do you?
Picture Credit: UniqueHotelsGroup
Your customer relationship is crucial to the success of your business. In the CSR / Sustainability business field the customer relationship is even more important than in most business fields.
Why? The most important service you can provide your client / customer is to help and educate them in CSR / Sustainability related topics. You have the knowledge and experience and they want you to show them what you can do to help. Your customer wants you as a person and not just your product or manpower.
Keep your business relationships as personal as possible
This is really the main message of today’s post. It is good to have a website, a blog, a Twitter account, or even a good selling book on Amazon. But if you want to sell your services or your product, your personal business relationships are most important.
We all have a lot of contacts, but how many of these contacts are so useful that you could try to convert this contact into a sale or at least into a “sales-lead” which you can be sure about? Maybe it would be worth checking your contacts database based on these criteria? I do this on a continuous basis each 6 months and it helps me enormously.
One tool I am using is Salesforce. Salesforce is a great tool to keep a separate contacts list with a proper history of the communication, contact details, documents, etc. It might sound as overkill to use such a potent CRM tool but if you are serious about converting potential sales into sales you need to make sure you do not lose track of your communications with your contacts.
My advice therefore is clear and simple. If you want to sell your service or product in the CSR / Sustainability field you need to keep your business relationships as personal as possible. Focus your efforts on making long lasting contacts which you can trust and they know that they can trust you. Obviously this process is ongoing and time consuming but by sticking to this objective you cannot go wrong. At least this is my experience.
Picture Credit: rachaelvoorhees on flickr
I have been following the recent developments of the OccupyWallStreet movement but must say that I am not sure how relevant it is for the overall CSR / Sustainability movement (In the US locally and for other countries globally).
Here is some background information on the movement:
The main website: http://occupywallst.org/
Some videos:
Hello Wall Street from socially_awkwrd on Vimeo.
Sign Language from socially_awkwrd on Vimeo.
An interesting development today has been that Ben & Jerrys openly declared their support for the movement. This is the link to the statement: To those who occupy. We stand by you.
What do you think is the relevance to CSR and Sustainability in general? Will this be a movement which will significantly influence the way we look at CSR / Sustainability?
If you are regular follower of my blog you will have noticed that I have changed the direction of my professional career somewhat in 2011. I moved from exclusively working with topics of Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) into a more general business-type role next to my old role. Within in the new business my main purpose is to make a profit and far less how to make the world a better place using Sustainability / CSR as a business model. This is the reality.
The main reason for this move all centered around my responsibility towards my family and making sure that they are provided for as mentioned in previous posts over the past months.
The point of this post:
So far the experience this year working in this new role has been quite a positive one I must admit. And this is surprising for me as well. I am a businessman by trade and that was my only experience before getting into the Sustainability / CSR business (if you discount flipping burgers at a famous fast food chain).
So where does this leave me with my commitment to Sustainability / CSR you might ask?
It is stronger than ever. This new found interest in business is, in some ways, extremely helpful. It helps me rediscover the main purpose of why I got into CSR / Sustainability in the first place.
For me Sustainability / CSR is an underlying view of how to conduct business in a responsible way. This is what I realized over the past months. The basics of making business remain the same. Each business needs to earn enough money to make ends meet. You need to know your product, your competitors, your own business (revenues, costs & rights), and (most importantly) your customer. These are the tools of your trade in my view.
But we also have a choice. The choice is to use these basic tools of your trade as responsible as possible in order to influence business best practice. I am doing my bit best I can, so what are you waiting for?
A structured approach to stakeholder engagement is an essential element of CSR / Sustainability best practice within an organization. We all know that. But starting out is not always as easy as it seems in my experience.
Here are three practical first steps which I identified as critical over the past years working in the industry when starting out with stakeholder engagement.
This is all for now. I prefer shorter blog posts as you will know by now. 
That is why the next blog post on stakeholder engagement will continue with the next steps on how to properly start with a structured stakeholder engagement approach.
Picture Credit: Robert Higgins
The past months brought a lot of change in my life as you will have read from some of my older posts. But one element of life has pretty much stayed the same. This blog. The possibility to write and have an audience is something I am very grateful for and which I enjoy so very much. Over the years, this blog evolved from my personal website to a respected source of CSR / Sustainability commentary and Social Media resources. This will not change. Quite the opposite.
The plan is to extend the range of topics I blog about in order for this blog to once again reflect what I do in my life on a professional level. This has always been the purpose of this blog and I felt that it was a little “out of sync” over the past months with what I do professionally these days.
Future posts will not always be on CSR / Sustainability and Social Media but will also include more about what I do on a more general business level. I am sure you will find these posts helpful as I am more convinced then ever that CSR / Sustainability topics are and need to be more of an integral part of business these days. And I want to do my bit to promote this integration with writing about my experiences and learnings.
These are the areas I will now write more about next to CSR / Sustainability and Social Media:
Thank you everyone for the support you have given me so far and I am sure that the new topics will also be as useful for you as the CSR / Sustainability and Social Media topics are.
This week saw an interesting development in the CSR / Sustainability field. JustMeans was acquired by 3blMedia. This is the link to the press release. I have had several emails and messages on Twitter and Google+ asking me what I thought about this new development. Here is what I make of it.
My View
I think this development is a sign of the current difficult economic times as well as normal consolidation in any kind of business sector. In my view JustMeans was going in no particular direction over the past months and seemed to slowly go away as a player in the CSR / Sustainability Social Media world. Toby Webb wrote about this several months ago and made some very good points.
This new development might kickstart another phase of interesting development for the site. I also hope that this acquisition does not mean that JustMeans will simply be another news outlet for 3blMedia. I am a strong believer in the fact that good content is the key to any websites success. If 3blMedia will focus on this strong content creation and engagement in a “non-marketing” and “honest” way I would expect the site to be a growing community for professionals in the field. This is what JustMeans wanted to be from the start after all. I hope they will succede with this new leadership. Best of luck from my side.
This is my take on the acquisition. What is yours?
While I am getting back in to the swing of things after my holidays I felt I needed to keep my first blog post short and direct.
Take a look at this cartoon:
I would be interested to hear what your view on the message of this cartoon is.
My view on this cartoon:
Obviously this is an exaggeration of the problem we face in convincing the senior leaders within business to sign on to Sustainability / CSR best practice. But I feel that we also need to be as direct as possible with these senior leaders to show them that Sustainability / CSR best practice is proving to also contribute to the bottom line of businesses. This is the language they will understand for sure. Some leaders also understand the ‘schmoozing’ Sustainability / CSR talk but definitely not the majority.
This cartoon also reminds me a little bit of some parts of the #csrdebate several weeks ago. One the one side argues as the Sustainability advocate and on the other as the sceptic.
But back to my original question: What is your view on the message of this cartoon?
A big thank you to polyp to let me use this cartoon.
It is now exactly 7 days ago that a storm in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) world broke out over an article by Aneel Karnani published in the Wall Street Journal titled: ”The case against Corporate Social Responsibility”.
In the article he argued that the idea of companies having a duty to address social ills is not just flawed but that it also makes it more likely that we’ll ignore the real solutions to these problems.
All week last week the reactions to this article from around the CSR community flooded in. People tweeted on Twitter, shared on Facebook and emailed from one practitioner to the other arguing for and against this point of view. Some reactions where in support of Mr Karnani but the majority where criticizing the simplicity of his argument and absolutely disagreed with his assessment that CSR in itself as a business principle was flawed.
This is a list of some of the reactions by authors and websites:
I do not want to go into detail what my view on this article is but if you have read my blog for a while you will know that I am all for CSR as a business concept and that in my view no organization now and in the future can allow itself to not take some aspects of CSR in account in order to make more money and take up its role as a responsible business in our society.
In any case. For me this strong reaction by the CSR community showed a lot more then the passion of some individuals.
My interpretation of this reaction from the CSR community to this article
Over the past few years a lot of people in the CSR community have been become increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress within global organizations to continue to implement a more material and meaningful CSR programs and practices within their business. At the same time more and more so called “business experts” started to make their voice heard and strongly criticized the whole purpose of CSR and its value for business. Common arguments include the lack of focus on the business case (ie. whether it makes the individual business more money embracing CSR) and the time is not right to lay further constraints on business growth (especially during an global economic downturn) by increasing its overhead costs and pulling vital budgets away to further strengthen CSR practices within a business.
The CSR Community is ready to face its critics: Last weeks reactions to the WSJ article showed that the CSR community is ready to face its critics and argue its way to increased recognition. It showed that there are many people out there that are willing to stand up and argue in favor of CSR, highlight the best practice and usefulness for the individual business and business as a whole across the globe.
Social Media and CSR is a winning combination: It has furthermore become very clear that social media as a tool is vital for the future of CSR. Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are and will continue to be the three cornerstones of the next phase of CSR in terms of communication and collaboration. The more people join in to share their ideas, examples and experiences to make CSR the business norm, the more we will be able to convince business across the globe that CSR is not just a business fashion but that it is able to adapt and change to include the latest trends and best practice as well. Adapting in a way that CSR is providing a voice to all diverse stakeholders opinions and that organizations which are willing and able to listen to these voices will hugely benefit from this in the short in long term.
For me as a member of the CSR community, this last week was a very encouraging week.
What was your view on the discussion and reactions of people to the WSJ article? I would love to hear your viewpoint.
Picture Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnorman/436670816/