As corporate community involvement gains increasing acceptance as a business activity, company executives are asking more searching questions about its management: How well are we doing? How do we compare with our peers and competitors? What results are we getting? To answer such questions, Bruce Naughton Wade has developed a “CCI Index” which was piloted during 1996 with seven companies – Barclays Bank, BP, BT, GrandMet, NatWest Group, North West Water and Whitbread.
At the heart of the Index is a standard model of best practice for use as a yardstick against which to compare individual companies’ programmes. The model is designed for consistency with the “Business Excellence Model” used for the UK and European Quality Awards, and comprises eight categories, covering both inputs to the programme and outputs actually achieved:
two ‘enabler’ categories – purpose and objectives; leadership and management.
four process categories – programmes and activities; internal communications; external communications; research, measurement and evaluation.
two results categories – business benefits; community benefits.
Each category is broken down into a number of separate elements, each with specific criteria of best practice. Where appropriate, companies are asked to provide evidence or examples of the performance they are claiming. So, for example, under “purpose and objectives” elements assessed include programme rationale, relevance to the business, focus and objectives, and the existence of defined performance indicators.
An expert team makes the assessment against the model and determines a score in each category, so performance by each company can be plotted on a “spider chart” (see illustration) both against best practice and against the actual scores achieved by other companies.
The value of the Index lies not just in the assessments and scoring, but in the specific “nuggets” of best practice identified. Examples from the pilot companies include:
Barclays: use of employee focus groups
BP: key performance indicators
BT: European Quality Award submission
GrandMet: use of CCI to support entry into new markets
NatWest: sharing of good practice internally
North West Water: satisfaction survey of community partners
Whitbread: internal ‘seeing is believing’ programme
Having pilot-tested the Index, we now intend to broaden the number of companies who can benefit from it. This will involve developing alternative, less resource-intensive forms of assessment, resulting in effective tools not just to compare performance but also to improve programme management for all companies active in the community.
Corporate Citizenship Briefing, issue no: 33 – April, 1997
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