CSR Services: Helping Your Team Increase Bandwidth
Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is changing by the day. Consumers want to buy with purpose. Employees want to make their labors worthwhile. And investors are taking note — using environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings developed by top financial institutions — to determine where they’re putting their hard-earned dollars.
This evolution creates new pain points for many. For years, social impact work has been completed by an individual or small teams with a limited scope. A public relations professional may have coordinated a monetary donation to a local nonprofit; a human resources specialist may have overseen an employee giving program; or an office manager may have overseen an employee volunteering event.
These individuals are now being asked to do much more — building a full CSR strategy, delivering employee volunteer events regularly, implementing a giving campaign, providing metrics on the program’s success, and telling the company’s story of good to internal and external audiences.
“The pandemic as well as recent natural disasters, which have increased in frequency and intensity, have made it obvious that companies and brands need to do more to assist those in their communities,” said Give To Get President Toby Garrett. “Unfortunately, building and scaling CSR programs that are authentic to your company and brand that also leave a meaningful, long-lasting impact in your community can be difficult, especially for those who haven’t done this type of work before.”
When it comes to executing CSR strategies, we are seeing the bottlenecks show up three ways:
Internal Demand and Supply
As noted above, the demand for CSR programming that is both responsive to current issues and able to be executed under fluctuating pandemic rules is pushing the limits of human capital supply. People are working from home, away from colleagues and the usual infrastructure. Communicating and mobilizing people under those conditions requires a lot more muscle. And the Great Resignation is putting everyone’s ability to execute in dire straits.
The Last Mile
This has always been the difficult part of social impact. The road is littered with grand plans and strategies that could never be executed. With the landscape in constant flux these days, taking the time to develop programs with communities in mind can be difficult, especially when companies are in multiple geographies trying to lay out a grand vision. Rolling out this vision with integrity and authenticity to local constituents takes more care than most have the ability to offer.
Measurement and Tracking
Finally, getting employees to track what they do has been a constant issue. You can use technology and plan until you are blue in the face, but getting the right information in the right place at the right time is labor intensive. To address that, departments are letting the measurement tail wag the CSR dog. They only do things where they can easily measure the outputs. That isn’t how to make the world better.
If these concerns sound familiar, let us know!