Most of the corporates we’ve interacted with in our marketing and advertising roles, seemed to have great intent when it came to CSR, but it never really seemed to receive their professional inputs or time. We’ve often wondered why. Especially given that a good amount of money was being spent on good causes and with and with good intention. We wanted to change that – because we believed that CSR deserved the same level of professionalism, passion and commitment that corporates and brands got.
This belief led us to form Green Kettle Consulting, a firm where we believe that corporates owe it to the causes they support to use not just their hearts but also their brains and professional experience to create greater impact.
So, we were delighted when Srikant (Growth-For-All) invited us to do a workshop format session at the CII meet on CSR Best Practices.The objective of the workshop was to see how corporates could go about translating their CSR intent into CSR action. Our talk focused on a simple step by step approach with examples and cases on how large and small corporates can meaningfully engage in CSR. We also included simple worksheets which helped them to figure out what areas and levels of engagement would make sense for them to start off on the CSR journey.
One question we’ve constantly been asked is ‘Do you need to be a large organization to do meaningful CSR?’
When CSR approach changes from “philanthropy” to doing business that has economic value for organization and social value for the community/ environment”, suddenly it becomes evident that all firms, big or small can certainly embrace CSR. In fact, many small firms may already be doing CSR without even realizing that a particular task is something that adds genuine value to society while being beneficial to business. This was certainly the case in the post session informal chat I had with delegates.
Small businesses can look at CSR in terms of four broad buckets in order not to get overwhelmed by the vast options that are available: Community, Marketplace, Employee, Environment. They also need to decide the level of engagement- starting from arm’s length to integrated into business. As an organization matures in its CSR journey, it would typically find that integrating CSR into business would yield the most sustainable and beneficial CSR results. Simple examples of integrating CSR would be use of less packaging material in designing products, building energy efficient offices or use of recycled material in manufacturing.
The heartening thing was that all the speakers and delegates- from corporate, social and government sector are clearly seeing a role for this win-win situation, and no longer frowning on “ulterior” motives that the corporate may have in engaging in genuinely socially responsible actions!
What follows is the presentation Manisha made at the CII – CSR Best Practices Workshop. If you want a copy of the presentation and worksheets, mail us at info@gkcmail.com
