So you’ve been asked to spearhead your company’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities or write the first report. Now what?
Dipping your toe into the sustainability waters can seem pretty daunting at first. With the likes of Unilever, Patagonia, and Nike leading the way you may feel like a fish out of water. But don’t throw in the towel just yet.
While there is no silver bullet, one place to start is with a little market intelligence. We’ve seen that time and time again a technique called benchmarking can help to answer some initial questions.
- What is CSR anyway?
Responsible business touches every part of your organization. It’s not simply carbon emissions or corporate philanthropy. A benchmark is a quick way to see how others in your sector are defining CSR and what areas they are addressing.
- Why should we do anything?
One of the hardest parts of advancing CSR is getting others internally to buy-in. Use human nature to your advantage. Pointing out where your performance lags behind – or is ahead – to your competitors fosters healthy competition and gives you the ammunition needed to incite action.
- What should we do?
At the end of the day, it’s all about minimizing risks and maximizing opportunities. Once you know where you are already doing well, and where you need to do more, you are in a stronger position to create a strategy or write that first report.
With the market intelligence from benchmarking in hand to answer these three questions, you’ll be in a great place to take your CR activities to the next level.
Corporate Citizenship’s offers a range of benchmarking services. Our Better Business Benchmark provides a tool to assess how companies are addressing 10 essential aspects we believe indicate a business is built for sustainable growth. For more on Corporate Citizenship’s suite of benchmarking services, click here.