Moving Beyond Green: The rainbow within CSR

By Bahar Gidwani

 

We participated in a CleanWeb Hackathon this past weekend. It was fun to hang out with 100+ programmers and designers who are interested in changing the world—a group of smart people who came up with some interesting ideas.

 

However, I was surprised that I had to explain several times why we at CSRHub track broad CSR (corporate social responsibility) and sustainability issues, rather than just whether or not a company is “green.” It seemed that folks who focus on “clean energy” and “clean tech” are into “carbon” and “climate change” and they care about how companies and people treat the environment. But not about the many other things that go into corporate responsibility and sustainability.

 

If I attended a conference of labor activists, they would talk about employee health care, training and safety, and community issues. Similarly, I know that whether you are involved in water issues, protection of indigenous people, animal treatment, or involvement in the military you are probably passionate about these subjects and less concerned with other areas.

 

Fortunately, our profiling system captures these variations. Any registered user can set a personal profile that reflects her or his individual priorities. The user can decide that corporate environmental performance should get the highest weight or that corporate governance, employee treatment, or community relations should dominate. Users can also tell our ratings engine that certain special issues should count in our overall ratings analysis.

 

We recently reviewed the profiles of our first few thousand users. We have decided to name the five groups with different colors, as follows:

 

38% = Green (environment focused). These people generally set the importance of environmental issues at between 60% and 75% above the mid-line. About half of this group ranked all the other aspects of CSR roughly equal. The rest were about equally split between also caring about a single other issue: community, governance, or employees.

 

9% = Blue (community and employee focused). This group pushed up the importance of community and employee engagement, and deemphasized environment and governance. There are subgroups that push up community more than employees and vice versa. But, this group clearly cares most about people and less about the environment or how companies are run.

 

9% = Red (governance focused). These people want companies to be ethical, have a balanced and diverse board, and to be transparent about their behavior. The main group (about two thirds of the Reds) put the rest of the choices as equal. The two sub groups had either a community or employee side concern.

 

18% = Grey (“all things being equal”). This large group of people declared all of the areas more or less equal. About half of them demoted one area by 10% to 25%—so they could have a little more focus on the other three. But, these users (our base is mostly activists and CSR professionals) want companies to follow a balanced approach to social responsibility.

 

26% = White (follow a leader). About a quarter of our users make their own profile, but chose to clone someone else’s profile instead of making their own. Most of them took the CSRHub average user profile as their viewpoint. These users may not have a strong opinion, or may be interested to know how “everyone else” feels about the companies they are researching.

 

Do the “green” people know they represent the viewpoint of less than 40% of the CSR community? Do the Blues and Reds realize that they could recruit and proselytize among large Grey and White communities, who might then switch to their view? We believe our data proves there is a rainbow of views on CSR. Both activists and companies could benefit from understanding the diversity of these views and by communicating messages that appeal to the needs of each of these groups.

 

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Photo courtesy of Capture Queen

 

Bahar Gidwani is a Co-founder and CEO of CSRHub. Formerly, he was the CEO of New York-based Index Stock Imagery, Inc, from 1991 through its sale in 2006. He has built and run large technology-based businesses and has experience building a multi-million visitor web site. Bahar holds a CFA, was a partner at Kidder, Peabody & Co., and worked at McKinsey & Co. Bahar has consulted to both large companies such as Citibank, GE, and Acxiom and a number of smaller software and Web-based companies. He has an MBA (Baker Scholar) from Harvard Business School and a BS in Astronomy and Physics (magna cum laude) from Amherst College. Bahar races sailboats, plays competitive bridge, and is based in New York City.

 

CSRHub Launches Unique Directory of Corporate CSR Websites

By Bahar Gadwani

About two months ago, CSRHub quietly added links to the CSR websites for a large minority of the companies we track. In a forthcoming update, we’ll be adding more of these links and we will soon have them available for almost half of the around 5,000 companies we track.

 

You can see these links (when we have them) at the top of our company page—right underneath the main website for each company. (We have corporate websites for almost every company in our database.) We also provide a company description, address information, and in many cases, a contact phone number. (This link will show you the page for Volkswagen AG.)

 

At present, all of this information is available free—although it is so valuable that we are considering only sharing it with our subscribers. The data can be exported (into an XML sheet) by those who have our “professional subscription”—which costs $89 per month or $799 per year. The data can also be accessed using our RESTful API.

 

There is no standard URL name, description, or data contents for these sites. Nevertheless, we were pleased to see that so many companies have built these separate CSR and sustainability-related areas. It was interesting to see that the “penetration” of these sites is highest within healthcare and finance:

 

We were even more surprised to see that the percentage of US companies who have CSR-areas on their websites was higher than that for European companies. Europe leads in most aspects of CSR—this seems to be one place where the US holds its own.

 

We were also pleased to see that words such as “CSR,” “social,” “responsibility,” and “sustainability” are heavily used in the URLs of these sites. After all, we chose to name our business CSRHub and our “tag line” is “Sustainability ratings.” Other terms such as “green,” “eco,” and “ESG” did not show up as often. (To read more about the naming of corporate social responsibility and sustainability read this past CSRHub blog post).

 

 

We are already being asked if we plan to add a directory of CSR managers and executives. So far, we have refrained from doing this, as we have been concerned that listing email addresses and phone numbers for these people could flood their desks with spam. However, we have been working closely with a number of major professional organizations in the CSR space, including SharedXpertise (publisher of CR Magazine), The International Society of Sustainability Practitioners (ISSP), 2DegreesNetwork, Net Impact, and Sustainable Life Media. Hopefully, there will be a way that we can all work together and eventually build networks that will allow those interested in sustainability to more easily reach each other.

 

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Bahar Gidwani is a Cofounder and CEO of CSRHub. Formerly, he was the CEO of New York-based Index Stock Imagery, Inc, from 1991 through its sale in 2006. He has built and run large technology-based businesses and has experience building a multi-million visitor Web site. Bahar holds a CFA, was a partner at Kidder, Peabody & Co., and worked at McKinsey & Co. Bahar has consulted to both large companies such as Citibank, GE, and Acxiom and a number of smaller software and Web-based companies. He has an MBA (Baker Scholar) from Harvard Business School and a BS in Astronomy and Physics (magna cum laude) from Amherst College. Bahar races sailboats, plays competitive bridge, and is based in New York City.