This post is the first of several that will cover the CSR Performance Summit  in New York City taking place today through Wednesday.  The Summit brings together business leaders to discuss and share knowledge on best practices and taking CSR to the next level.  Krista Pilot of DKC Public Relations covered today’s sessions for buildingctgreen.com.

Today’s CSR Performance Summit, sponsored by Global Strategic Management Institute, kicked off with a workshop on aligning CSR and a corporate balanced scorecard.  Basically, we spent a morning wrestling with some excellent questions around what is CSR, how to determine where your company is on the CSR continuum, and how to integrate CSR into company strategy. The highly interactive session was led by the able Ted Jackson of Ascendant Strategy Management Group and with strong participation from JetBlue, Bank of NY Mellon, International Gaming Technology, and Abbott Labs, to name a few.  Bet you didn’t know that there is someone out there with the title, “Director of Responsible Gaming.” Now you do.

The group concluded that CSR has to stay relevant and business-oriented, and had some critique of Ethical Corporation’s list of ten reasons to continue with CSR in a recession .  Ted had some good insights about Web 2.0 and its impact on corporate entities: “More people who control your reputation than ever before.” Ted used Best Buy as an example of best practice on CSR, which led to a lively debate on the data they report, and to whether or not CSR had any role in their triumph over now-bankrupt competitor, Circuit City (conclusion: none).

In the ensuing conversation about consumers, marketing and CSR, JetBlue had an interesting comment about their CSR activities, and how to talk to the public about them: “If we talk about it, it is self serving.”  So their strategy is to post the information, make it easily available, but not push it with customers. 

Another interesting discussion came around whether or not companies benchmark on CSR, and if companies choose strategically whether to be a follower or leader.  Ted used the case of “dolphin-safe” tuna as a good example of how CSR can help companies to find “cover” in a leadership position – getting competitors to fall-in behind a more expensive alternative because of risk to reputation and possible consumer backlash.  Participating companies were inclined to be leaders in CSR (perhaps a self-selection issue of people who chose to attend this workshop).  A representative of a mining company talked about how CSR is a “calling card” for his company when hoping to break into new markets outside the United States.

Ted presented the group with a backgrounder on balanced scorecards, which have been in use in corporate world for at least a decade or longer, and we discussed how to fit CSR into corporate strategy, how to measure it, and how to respond to those results.  The more global companies in the workshop talked about the pressure from Europe – whether from subsidiaries or from RFPs – that was putting CSR more squarely at the center of corporate strategy.   There was a great deal of discussion about Ted’s model for categorizing corporate and non-profit CSR programs as: 

*heart of the business

*key differentiator for company

*worthwhile pursuit

Some argued that CSR should be at the heart of every business, while others felt that indeed there are some companies for whom this is a worthwhile pursuit only.  There was debate about whether only non-profits or quasi social enterprise companies like Tom’s Shoes  can truly be socially responsible.  However, as one participant astutely noted, no matter what you think of CSR,  “You don’t want to be the one company who doesn’t care.”

 
Krista Pilot is a Senior Vice President at DKC Public Relations, a communications consultancy in NYC.  She works with companies on communicating to consumers, business customers and influencers on CSR and environmental sustainability.  Prior to joining DKC, she was Director, Community Affairs at United Technologies Corporation, where she launched UTC’s first CSR report.  An avid Twitter fan, this is Krista’s first experience as a guest blogger.  You can follow Krista on Twitter at @kjpilot.

Filed under: Corporate Responsibility, Green Business