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Giving Credit, and a very important word - Context.

Dave Stangis | Wednesday 17th June 2009

I have been meaning to do a short post about some work that a group of students from Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) pulled together for me.

The process started back in January when a professor contacted me to ask if I would be willing to let a group of graduate students perform a semester project for a new class, Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: A Business Proposition?

Some of the early conversations focused around having the group perform an assessment of Campbell's first CSR report. However, having had a lot of experience in working with similar graduate projects, I wanted to provide the students an opportunity to not only deliver something that would be useful to the company but would also significantly advance their understanding of the state of CSR and sustainability.

These weren't just any students. Most of these individuals had professional experience under their belt already. They were diverse and very articulate. They were self-directed and delivered a comprehensive review of both the entry-level points for CSR in the food and beverage sector as well as some of the benchmark examples.

I met the team for a face-to-face report out in New York while I was there for the CSR Performance Metrics Summit. The project manager, Cimarron Nix, led the communication and interaction. The rest of the team each owned a core deliverable and presented both their results and perspectives. We had a great conversation and I was able to share the results with our team inside of Campbell.

I frankly thought they did a great job. And, in the case of CSR and sustainability, I think results sharing leads to improved learning. So I've posted the presentation over here on JustMeans so that anybody can review it.

The most important thing I took from the presentation was the concept of context. It's one of the things even leading companies sometimes struggle with. Even the best metrics and indicators mean little to the audience reading the report if the context isn't spelled out. The benchmarking project helped several people better understand both the entry point and the benchmark for CSR in our sector, but my biggest take away will be testing for context when I pull together Campbell's next CSR report.

For the record, the full Columbia SIPA team was made up by:
- Cimarron Nix: cimnix@gmail.com
- James Marshall: j.f.marshall@mac.com
- Shannon Mullins: sjm2148@columbia.edu
- Elen Portero de Paula: epp2107@columbia.edu
- Harriette Williams: hew2109@columbia.edu

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