Poll Findings: Corp. Communicators Would Increase CSR
Ragan Communications and Pollstream just released a poll
that finds that corporate communicators want their companies to engage
in more corporate social responsibility (CSR); they just can’t come up
with a good business reason why or decide who should drive it.
This follows an earlier poll from IBM and covered in this space, that reported that corporate executives want to see more CSR, too, and were devoting resources to it.
The
poll was part of a series spearheaded by Ragan that regularly queries
some 439 corporate communicators in North and South America, Europe,
Asia, Africa and Australia.
The communicators split almost
evenly over the issue of who should run a company’s CSR efforts. Just
about 50 percent it should be a standalone department that reports
directly to the CEO. The other 50 percent said CSR should fall under
either media relations, internal communications or marketing.
It
would be a measure of the esteem that CSR holds in a company if it
operated independently and reported directly to the CEO. But I wouldn’t
hold my breath that that will happen soon or (if it does) last long.
[Remember:
when the discipline of marketing first emerged in the 1950s and 1960s
that function reported to the CEO. Nowadays marketing is more likely to
fall under operations and therefore the president or COO.]
If I
was running a CSR operation and my choice was to work under media
relations, internal communications or marketing, I’d hold my nose and
pick marketing. Corporate communications and PR staffs are like the
athletes that finish sixth at the Olympic trials: nobody cares about
them.
Not that marketing is a perfect fit. Hardly. But a
company’s marketing operation has an actual budget in sharp contrast
with the alternatives.
It’s interesting to compare the why of
CSR between the corporate communicators and their bosses. The Ragan
poll turned up four reasons why the communicators would increase CSR:
50 percent said it would enhance PR and corporate image; 40 percent
said it would improve employee engagement; 7 percent expect it would
grow sales and 4 percent say it would attract new employees.
By
contrast, the CEOs see CSR has a business opportunity, not a chance to
issue a press release. As an electronics CEO was quoted in the IBM
study of CEOs, “Corporate identity and CSR will play an important role
in differentiating a company in the future… This will make a big
difference in new markets such as Russia and other Eastern European
markets.”
Now we know why a CEO is more likely to start in the company’s mailroom than in its corporate communications office; too few communicators think like business people!