Companies must go beyond the ritualistic annual Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports and formulate a strategy that has a stronger human touch, authentic engagement with external stakeholders, deeper transparency of their CSR outcomes and a considerably more sophisticated understanding of public perception.
A company can be profitable, but is it a great company? That’s the real CSR expectation from the society. Companies are aware of the CSR challenge and they spend considerable amount of financial, human and material resources on community and social projects, but the return on these investments are hard to quantify and public perception often remains negative. This is why companies now need a new CSR strategy.
Performeks LLC has more than fifteen years of experience covering CSR strategy, its implementation and evaluation. Using our unique insights from grassroots work and board-level executive discussions, we have developed a new approach that combines hard CSR data analysis with deep-dive public perception assessment to identify optimal CSR investment and communications strategy for companies. The focus is on measuring and quantifying outcomes and results—not just input like financial and in-kind contributions.
Our data approach empowers companies with CSR intelligence and assets they need to enter new markets, retain and attract talented professionals, earn the social license to operate, and build goodwill and trust with stakeholders. Our CSR analytics help companies reap direct financial value through business risk management and improved operational efficiency from resource use.
Tailored specifically for large corporations, our specialized CSR web tools build information readiness and enable companies and their operational sites to monitor the performance of CSR programs and initiatives using valid and verifiable metrics and indicators. Our services cover data integration and organization, benchmarking and performance evaluation, CSR media analytics, opinion surveys, social impact assessments, environmental impact and compliance analysis, reputations monitoring and communications, supply chain management, public complaints and community relations.
[Download our CSR strategy presentation]
CSR Scorecard Dashboard
Our CSR services utilize proprietary knowledge tools and database of key performance indicators, metrics, sectoral and company benchmarks and case studies on community relations, water, energy, environmental and climate change issues.
A demo version of the CSR dashboard (available on request) shows a comparative analysis of some gold mining companies that are members of the World Gold Council (WGC). This dashboard displays data and analysis for a sub-sample of twenty three CSR indicators covering environmental, human resources, socio-economic and commercial aspects.
The full commercial version of our dashboard is marketed under the brand name “CSR Scorecard” and it includes (1) monthly data collection system at the department/unit level, (2) Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) tool, (3) CSR reputations tracking system, (4) CSR trend analysis, (5) CSR project tracking system, (6) CSR knowledgebase and (7) public complaints tracking system.
CSR Media Analytics
Three external factors have changed the CSR ecosystem. First, it is not enough for companies to just understand the expectations of financial markets and consumers—they must make efforts to understand the expectations of external stakeholders too. Second, it is extremely risky for companies to equate CSR to PR. And finally, in the age of the internet and social media, external stakeholders can closely monitor business activities and quickly mobilize local, national and international campaigns.
Therefore, companies need to constantly monitor how they are perceived by the external world. To address this need, our CSR media analytics tool applies the cutting-edge “Big Data” framework to track public discussions on online media outlets, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other sources to analyze CSR trends, issues, sentiment and public opinion at the corporate or site level. The CSR intelligence distilled from these online sources contributes to the company’s CSR strategy and investment decisions.
Sometimes, companies are not aware of the priorities of their stakeholders; and at other times external stakeholders are not fully aware of the good work of companies. It is important to reconcile such information divergence. Our CSR media analytics service helps companies to bridge this important information gap on CSR issues.
[More in our CSR strategy presentation]
