Seven Best Practices in CSR Tie Community Engagement as Best Antidote to Greenwashing

CSR practitioners in search of a set of guidelines that help to integrate sustainable initiatives with social responsibility might consider reviewing Seven Best Practices from SDialogue LLC Founding Partner Perry Goldschein. SD Dialogue is a communications firm specializing in strategic sustainability. While CSR practitioners need to stay current in best CSR practices, ultimately they need to find a blend that mines forward-thinking research on corporate social responsibility with their knowledge base of their organization's culture, opportunities and challenges. That being said, here's a paraphrased synopsis of Goldschein's Seven Best Practices from a writeup synthesized by Cecilia Lu of Kiwano Marketing:

#1. Measurable Goals Need to Be Created. ROI challenges are strangers to no one in the corporate world, particularly in translating CSR measures. Start with simple actions in your organization as a way to champion small shifts in familiar terrain. Consider improvements to employee policies aimed at reducing turnover and enhance recruitment; or activities such as solid waste reduction and recycling, which can be conveyed in a worthy story that explains the relationship between the company's sustainability initiatives and the company's overall business strategy.

#2. Stakeholders Must be Engaged. The fastest road to a crucial mistake made by many companies is to avoid interaction with stakeholders. If you want to be clear about your company's CSR values, missions, strategy and implementation, be sure to start a two-day consultative exchange process with stakeholders from the word go. If you seek to arrive at successful implementation of your CSR strategy, be sure that your stakeholders are participating in regulatory discussions, lively and ongoing relationship improvements and in the dismantling of CSR hurdles and averting of possible crises.

#3. Apply a Sustainability Issues Mapping Approach. Save your company time and dollars in the start-up CSR research stage by incorporating interactive maps to pin down priority issues. According to Amnesty International UK's Founder and Chair Sir Geoffrey Chandler, this type of mapping is "a most stimulating approach. It brings together things which ought to go together, but too frequently don't."

#4. Develop a Sustainability Management System (SMS). To ensure that the entire company's decision-making processes are successful, they must go hand-in-hand with the creation of an environmental, social and economic CSR structure. Launch a prioritization process of sustainability characteristics and impacts; then consider legal obligations associated with those characteristics and impacts in light of your organization's existing compliance; consider teaming with an environmental consultant to assist as you go through this exercise; delineate the goals and objectives of your particular organization; be sure to provide employee education and training on how to use the SMS; and audit at regular intervals to ensure efficiency.

#5. Cradle-to-Grave Lifecycle Approach is Critical. The days where only the product mattered are long gone. By investing in a CSR strategy that includes the start-to-finish product loop, you get to flex and demonstrate the company's creative and innovation muscles and are likely to also improve the financial bottom line. Customer rapport and brand loyalty are likely to see improvements, too, when you find ways to re-purpose the product through either re-use or by providing other ways for the product not to end up in the landfill.

#6. Make Sustainability/CSR Reporting Easily Accessible. Don't allow it to minimize your efforts in anyway, but be sure to make your CSR reporting available through your website at least via PDF or other environmentally-friendly method. Be sure to ask your stakeholders for input.

#7. Transparency is Paramount to Sustainability Branding. We've seen the stats--when the Sierra Club endorsed Clorox Green Works, the company captured 42% of market share in year one. But don't make the greenwashing mistake that McDonald's did, for example, when it tried to swap their logo's background color from red to green as a way to appeal to customers in Europe. The company attempted to carry out the last CSR step while they were still conducting a number of unsustainable processes and involved with a number of unsustainable vendors. This move didn't go over well with stakeholders and cost them additional credibility.