Anna Clark explains why selling your green strategy with science alone won’t work, and that the art of sales must be mastered. She provides six tactics for selling your green strategy to all types of stakeholders whether it be employees or customers.
If business wants to regain the public’s trust, they’re going to have to be trustworthy, and employees are the key. Here are three basic steps to engage your employees, build social capital, and win stakeholder trust.
Many companies are turning to Corporate Social Responsibility as a strategy to win back the trust of their stakeholders and customers. It won’t work. Why? Because you don’t become trustworthy by asking people to trust you even more. Corporate social responsibility requires trust.
There is a serious lack of trust among consumers these days. Citizens of every country are eying large national and multi-national corporations with a narrowed, suspicious gaze. Questions are being asked. Answers demanded. With taxpayers around the world bailing out stupendous failures in the financial, housing, and insurance sectors, there is more than a lack of consumer confidence affecting the market. Frankly, we’re over it. We just don’t trust big business anymore. This is actually nothing new. But the uniform opinion of distrust, leveraged by the social media tools of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning sites, and blogging seems to have brought us to a tipping point.
So you wrote a CR report! Big deal! What next? Make it BUZZ. The thing about writing CSR reports is that they take a helluvalotta energy. The reporting process takes months, involves many internal and external stakeholders, and creates a reporting frenzy in the organization which bypasses none but the most unengaged employees. In theory, that is. Sometimes reporting is an intensive process for a just small group of individuals in the organization. Whatever the format, it’s intense. There’s a build-up. A deadline. Many hurdles to defuse. (is that as mixed metaphore?) Then. It happens. You send the report to print (or upload it to your fancy new html flash mini-site for viewing by the general public) and that’s it. B-I-G sigh of relief. Mop your brow. Stare into space and feel the release. Off to the bar for a celebratory drink. Sit back and wait for the compliments to start flowing in. I suspect this is how it happens in most organizations.
The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) and Ceres, a US coalition of environmental and investor groups, today called for submissions to the ninth-annual Ceres-ACCA North American Awards for Sustainability Reporting. The purpose of the awards program is to acknowledge and publicize best practice in reporting on sustainability, environmental and social performance by corporations and organizations and to provide leadership to those companies that are publishing or intend to publish sustainability reports.
They say the best way to beat your adversaries is to get to know them. CSR reports have many adversaries. In an attempt to get to know them, and understand how to better position the valuable process of CSR reporting, here is a list of useful applications of CSR reports which I imagine reporting adversaries could have generated.
Coro Strandberg, Principal of Strandberg Consulting, has introduced the Corporate Social Responsibility and Human Resource Management Checklist that identifies ten steps HR professionals can follow to support the integration of CSR into their organization’s business strategy and operations. A companion document, The Role of Human Resource Management in Corporate Social Responsibility: Issue Brief and Roadmap, provides a how-to guide including practical business-based examples and a business case for CSR integration.
The faculty of the Institute of Green Professionals in cooperation with the BIM Education Co-op and the Carter Center in Real Estate, School of Business and Economics at the College of Charleston are asking for your ideas on how to popularize the integration of sustainable development professionals. For the best idea, as determined by our faculty and co-sponsors, we will name the study/research/project after you or your company.
