If corporate social responsibility is not clearly presented to the media, is it any wonder when it is not clearly represented by the media? In the second of his regular features, Roger Cowe examines what needs to be done if companies are going to get their message across.
The amount companies give to charities has suddenly assumed great importance.
Every limited company has had to include the amount of its charitable donations in its annual report since the 1960s. The Directory of Social Change has published league tables for years. The London Benchmarking Group has helped to standardise the calculation. The Percent Club has encouraged companies to give more.
All this has helped to increase corporate contributions, for which the charity sector is truly grateful. But now this is being seen in some important quarters as a measure of ‘CSR virility’. The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, has banged on about how US companies give much more than their British counterparts. And The Guardian this month publishes a special supplement detailing the misers and saints among the corporate elite.
Companies at the forefront of CSR can be forgiven for a collective shaking of the heads at the notion that charitable donations signify a company’s corporate responsibility. Despite the greater standardisation in the calculation it is still too easy to miss important financial inputs. But more significantly, the amount of cash a company delivers to the voluntary sector is a tiny part of its impact on society.
This is not well understood in the media, where the whole concept of CSR is still pretty fuzzy and where simple figures are much more appealing than complex arguments.
The typical business response is the shaking of the head, the shrug of the shoulders and a condemnation of the media’s shallowness and ignorance. But that invites continued shallowness and ignorance, and it is not the kind of response which companies would adopt in other areas of corporate communications.
If a company wants its business to be better understood, it will typically set about communicating better: explaining the intricacies, enlightening the ignorant and correcting misconceptions.
This can be done with CSR – but only by companies which have a good story to tell. It is no good complaining that the media misunderstands social responsibility if the business world makes little effort to explain what companies think is important, and demonstrate performance on those criteria.
For a company to argue successfully that charitable giving should not be a measure of its social impact, it needs to be able to offer a viable alternative. That is the difficulty. First, any such measure would be more complex than a simple cash sum. Secondly, there is no generally accepted measure of social performance. And third, too few companies can demonstrate that their approach to social responsibility is much deeper than giving away some of their hard-earned profits.
In those circumstances the media can be forgiven for choosing the easy route of focusing on charitable support. And while so many companies give so little, any attempt to deflect attention from this aspect will look guilty and defensive – like a child trying to change the subject when caught not having done their homework.
It is not easy to change media perceptions, especially when it involves substituting complexity for simplicity. It can only be done from strength – the strength of financial contributions, clear thinking and action on CSR throughout the business, and a clear conviction at the top of the company that this is important.
Also, it can only be done through a prolonged campaign. Explaining CSR is not a one-minute wonder. It will take a while to penetrate the collective media brain. Consistent performance, allied to sustained messages, is the only way.
Roger Cowe is a freelance journalist, writing regularly for the Financial Times, The Guardian and other leading journals.
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