Chief scientist issues call over climate
Posted on | September 26, 2011 | No Comments
In Australia, television viewers are bombarded with tv commercials that critisize the government plans to implement a carbon tax. Earlier Aussie actress Cate Blanchet appeared in a pro-carbon tax campaign. It’s very hard to distinguish the political rhetoric from the real facts.
Chief scientist issues call over climate.
More obese than starving — SOS Children
Posted on | September 25, 2011 | No Comments
The most shocking news I read this week was the fact that 15% of the world population is hungry while 20% (!) suffers from “excess nutrition”. It’s so easy to eat too much.
Even this morning while we were having breakfast I noticed my 7 year old, eating an adult portion of scrambled eggs with bacon. It was way too much for him although he enjoyed it a lot! If I wouldn’t have told him, he would have finished his plate without any problem with a big smile on his face and probably asking for more.
It’s time we start educating our children about what’s going on in the world with regards to food distribution and that it’s much more healthy to limit yourself to what you really need.
More obese than starving — SOS Children.
2011 PR Newswire awards: blog winner
Posted on | March 11, 2011 | No Comments
PR Newswire has announced “Kaiser Permanente ‘Dispatches From Haiti’” as the winner of the PR Newswire blog award 2011. I’ve written about the PR Newswire CSR awards in the previous blog. According to PR Newswire: “Dispatches From Haiti showcased Kaiser Permanente’s strength as a concerned corporate citizen”.
My favorite award nominee was USANA Health Sciences – What’s Up, USANA? I believe it’s much more challenging for an organisation to convince senior management to write a blog and to see social media as a business opportunity instead of a risk. For that reason alone I believe the PR Team of USANA deserved the award – even if it’s not all CSR related. Luckily there are more CSR awards to be won and I’m sure What’s Up, USANA will be nominated again.
For more see the award announcement article on PR Newswire.
CSR Awards: and the winner is…
Posted on | March 2, 2011 | No Comments
It’s award time. I’m not referring to the Oscars but to the PR News CSR awards. PR News will announce the winners of the CSR awards on March 8.
PR News has a lot of awards to give out. The organization identified 26 award categories ranging from ‘Human Rights Communications’ to ‘CSR executive of the year’ and the best ‘CSR annual report’.
In this blog post, I will take a closer look at the three nominees in the best blog category. They are:
- Kaiser Permanente – “Dispatches From Haiti”
- Tiller LLC – Rob Densen’s Huffington Post Blog: CSR Matters
- USANA Health Sciences – What’s Up, USANA?
And the winner is…
We won’t know until March 8. But if it was up to me, I would give the award to the PR team at USANA Health. Their blog gives a great inside look at the company. Most corporates still don’t know how to deal with social media focusing on the risks and ignoring the opportunities. USANA clearly passed that phase and uses social media to their full advantage.
Which blog do you like most? Are there any other CSR blogs that should be nominated?
Find more information on the three nominees below:
1. Kaiser Permanente – “Dispatches From Haiti”
Dispatches from Haiti is a WordPress blog with posts written by “Kaiser Permanente volunteers supporting Haitian earthquake relief efforts”. The blog has a very minimalistic look and feel and two pages: ‘home’ and ‘about’.
It’s a diary style blog with descriptions of the day to day activities of the volunteers. The last entry was on 13 December 2010, when the volunteers arrived safely home.
It’s not the first time this blog won an award. In October 2010, it received the PR News Digital PR Award for Best Blog.
2. Tiller LLC – Rob Densen’s Huffington Post Blog: CSR Matters
Rob Densen, founder and CEO of Tiller Cause Marketing and communications, writes guests blog for the Huffington Post. The problem with Rob Densen’s blog is that I could not find it on the website. Instead I came across the blog “Philanthropy Channel Launches New Series — CSR: Myopia” written on July 10, 2010. Possibly Rob Densen changed the headline and this is the blog PR News nominated.
In his blog, Rob Densen expresses his views on aligning CSR with corporate objectives. Rob Densen is an excellent writer and he communicates his ideas on CSR in a very convincing way.
3. USANA Health Sciences – What’s Up, USANA?
The last nominee is ‘What’s Up, USANA’ a blog written by the PR staff of USANA Health Sciences, a manufacturer of nutritional supplements.
Instead of their corporate website, the company uses blog platform ‘Blogger’ to publish the blog. One of the contributors is Tim Haran, manager of Social media content at USANA. Interestingly he was named blogger of the year in the 2010 PR News PR People award. Although this is a CSR award, most blog entries are not CSR related.
It’s obvious that the PR staff of USANA is very much into social media. Besides the blog, USANA Health has a Facebook page and they are active on Twitter. The PR team even convinced their management team to write updates for their own blog: “USANA Health Sciences, the official word from USANA’s Management team”. This is a great achievement.
Full list of PR News CSR award nominees
Blog: Kaiser Permanente – “Dispatches From Haiti”
Blog: Tiller LLC – Rob Densen’s Huffington Post Blog: CSR Matters
Blog: USANA Health Sciences – What’s Up, USANA?
Water use in developing countries
Posted on | October 15, 2010 | No Comments
Today is Blog Action day 2010 organised by water.org to raise the awareness of the water crisis in developing countries.
Writing a blog about water issues is not the solution but it will help to make us think about the hugh discrepancies between the wealthy countries and the developing world. While we take our water consumption for granted, we often forget that something as simple as getting clean drinking water from a tap is still a dream for millions of people. The percentage of the population without access to safe drinking water is still much to low.
Water Facts:
How are we wasting water
This morning I woke up, went to the bathroom for my daily shower (80 litres of water), brushed my teeth and flushed the toilet (10 litres of water). Within 5 minutes after waking up, I used at least 90 litres of water.
According to statistics, Australian households are amongst the highest domestic water users in the world. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that
in 2004-2005 the daily water consumption per Australian was 282 litres a day.
(source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Water account, Australia, 2004-2005, ABS, Canberra, 2006).
282 litres! Only households in the USA and Canada use more water.
In many developing countries, water consumption is as low as 20 litres a day for the average person. This is what we used in Europe in the 19th century (!). We feel we are entitled to use water in large quantities for simple chores such as washing the car and the washing machine. But shouldn't we at least make an effort to make sure that every person on this earth has access to clean drinking water. That would make the world a better place.
Please also check out this great video made by change.org:
Blog Action Day 2010: Water from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.
Blogging is not the solution to the water problem. But it does help if we can raise the awareness of the water issue, by writing about it.
Tags: Australia > Blog action day 2010 > clean drinking water > water > water crisis > water issues
CSR cartoons
Posted on | October 13, 2010 | No Comments
Feeling bored and uninspired this morning, I decided to do an ‘image’ Google search on Corporate Social Responsibility.
In addition to the obvious images like a green earth, flowers and bees, and flow charts with CSR strategies, the first search result page showed links to two Corporate Social Responsibility cartoons.
Ethical policy
The first cartoon focusses on the attitude of directors in board rooms of the big corporates. The directors know they are expected to show to the outside world that they are serious about responsible business practices. However, they are not yet convinced about the real benefits.
(source: www.filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
CSR=Sorting out waste
The second cartoon tells us that the CSR programs of some corporates still lack substance. The managment of these companies fail to take into consideration the business benefits of a long term CSR program and believe that sorting out waste is enough to keep the stakeholders happy.
(source: www.sustainabilityblog.org)
Chairman’s message CSR reports Australian Banks
Posted on | August 17, 2010 | No Comments
It’s amazing these days what you can find on the web. Today I discovered Tagxedo (www.tagxedo.com) which you can use to create visuals with words. It’s really easy. As an example, I copied and pasted the text of the Chairman’s message of the CSR report of ANZ Bank. This is the result:
Charles Goode, Chairman (ANZ Corporate Responsibility Review 2009)
To compare, I made another visual based on the CSR report of NAB, another Australian bank. This is their tag cloud:
Cameron Clyne, Group CEO
The nice thing about these tag clouds is that they allow to make some interesting observations. The NAB tag cloud for example shows that Group CEO likes to write about customers and the community. Interestingly, the message of the chairmain in the ANZ report does not contain a single mention of the word ‘customer’. Instead he uses the word ‘employee’ more often compared to the NAB CEO statement.
Although it’s too easy to conclude from the tag clouds that the main focus of ANZ’s sustainability program is on servicing customers while NAB believes more in keeping employees happy. But still. Given the fact that a chairman’s message usually reflects the main focus areas of the report, the tag clouds provide a deeper understanding of a company’s sustainability thinking.
The next step will be to create tag clouds for different industries to compare the main sustainability themes.
Cause marketing in Australia
Posted on | August 4, 2010 | No Comments
A few weeks ago, I read an article about the impact of cause marketing on marketing budgets. The product manager of a well known lady sanitary product – I believe it was Always – mentioned that she spends most of her marketing budget on cause marketing related campaigns. That’s very impressive.
A lot of research has been done and all studies seem to confirm that cause marketing has positive effects on product sales. Early 2008, Bill Gates said in his speech at Davos:
“If you give people a chance to associate themselves with a cause they care about, they will pay more, and that premium can make an impact.”
After reading about the positive impact of cause marketing on consumer behavior, I assumed it must have taken a hugh flight everywhere in the developed world including Australia, where I now live. Until… this morning.
My visit to Woolworths
This morning, I decided to go to one of the largest outlets of Woolworths in Sydney. My goal was to find examples of cause marketing campaigns. I expected to find at least one example in every aisle.
But no, my visit was a bit dissapointing.
My not-very-representative-in-store-research-project reveals that many brands only mention that they are 100% Australian owned or that the product is 100% Australian made.
In the bottled water section, I saw Frantalle, a brand which partners with the Australian red cross. Next to the Frantelle brand, I saw One Water, an ethical consumer brand. But these were really the only two examples I could find in the entire store. I may have missed some but it can’t have been more than a few.
What does this mean?
Are Australian consumers different from people in the US or Europe? Do they care less about supporting good causes? Somehow I can’t believe that’s the case. Or do the marketing departments simply don’t see the need for spending marketing money on good causes?
I don’t have an answer, but personally, as a consumer, I would like to see more ethically sound products in my local Australian supermarket.
Tags: Australia > bill gates > cause marketing > consumer behavior > ethical consumer > marketing campaigns
The use of data graphics in CSR reports
Posted on | June 21, 2010 | No Comments
To learn more about graphs, I read ‘The Visual Display of Quantative Information’, a book written by Edward Tufte, an American statistical professor who calls useless charts, ‘chart junk’.
The title of his book ‘The Visual Display of Quantative Information’ does not sound very appealing. the book however, contains beautiful illustrations and is clearly written by someone who is passionate about the topic. I read it from A to Z in no time.
The book made me look at graphs differently. Usually I take graphs for granted. I see them without really looking at them. The main reason is that most of the graphs in newspapers and annual reports don’t look very attractive and are not very useful.
This graph in the 2009 CSR report of Australian bank, CBA, is a good example of a junk graph. It’s a basic time-series bar graph. The graph displays the lost time injury frequency rate over a three years period.
To demonstrate why the graph is not very useful I use Tufte’s method to calculate the data density of the graph. Tufte calculates this as follows:
Number of entries in data matrix / area of data display
The CBA graph presents a data matrix of six entries: three numbers and three years. That’s it. In the report, the graph covers 56 square centimeters, resulting in a data density of only 0.11 numbers per square centimeter.It may be that this graph shows a direction but it also has a very low data density. In Tufte’s words, this is a good example of a ‘junk graph’.
Nowadays anyone can make a graph using with Word, PowerPoint or Excel. In fact, it has become so easy, we all believe we are ‘graph experts’. In Word all you need to do is click on insert chart, click a chart type and select data row. Enter and done! However, this is not the way to make a graph. To do it right you need to know something about statistics and this is what most people (including myself) lack.
Besides good knowledge of statistics, the key to making a good graph is the availability of data, lot’s of it. But I realize that the availability of quantitative data in CSR is still problematic. CSR data collection is not yet high on the agenda of the average CSR department.
To make CSR activities more transparent, companies could perhaps focus more on information gathering. Using more data in the reports and displaying it the right way by using interesting graphs is a logical way forward.
In the next post, I will provide some examples of good and bad graphs in CSR reports. If anyone has a good example of a CSR graph to share, please let me know.
The 2010 Vodafone sustainability report
Posted on | June 10, 2010 | No Comments
In CSR (corporate social responsibility) reporting, there is no generic checklist a business can follow for writing a good CSR report. Depending on the industry, the size of the company and the country it operates in, each CSR report will have different focus areas. There are however ideas you can pick from published CSR reports. In this post I will look at the 2009 CSR report of Vodafone.
Vodafone won the CR Reporting Award 2010 for its 2009 Corporate Responsibility Report. This is an excellent achievement. This week the company published the 2010 sustainability report with the title: ‘Pressing Forward’.
What can we learn from Vodafone about sustainability reporting? Why is this a good CSR report?
1. Clear overview to point out the relationship between ‘what we do’ and ‘related issues‘. This overview makes it easy to understand the rational behind the sustainability initiatives and the link with the business.
2. Vodafone publishes local reports in nine of the markets it operates in. This makes Vodafone one of the few global companies to provide sufficient resources to local CSR teams to run local CSR programs. Good!
3. Use of symbols. The graphic symbols (for links, case studies, short term targets and strategic objectives) look nice and make it easy for readers to distinguish between the different text elements.
4. Involvement of the CEO, Vittorio Colao and his personal style. In the introduction he writes: “I intervened personally on a number of occasions to reinforce our stance on the absolute priority of operating safely and protecting Vodafone employees, contractors and the general public.” The words ‘I intervened personally‘ shows strong commitment from the top which is very motivating for the employees.
5. Email address to provide feedback on the report. The first page provides the reader with an email address to give feedback.
6. Table to show ‘direct economic impact’ of the company. The overview shows the cash distibution to different groups including suppliers (31.625 million), employees (3.288 million) and shareholders (4.195 million). This overview is clearly linked to the financial report information. Vodafone has not chosen for an integrated report but the overlap is visible.
7. Link between innovation and sustainability. In several sections in the report Vodafone shows a clear link between innovation and sustainability. The company distinguishes eight strategic sustainability objectives and writes: “These eight ambitious, aspirational objectives aim to increase our overall sustainability contribution by promoting innovation within the organisation”. This positions Vodafone as true ‘bottom of the pyramid’ company.
Is there anything else you particularly like about the Vodafone report which you would like to share?
Check out the Vodafone sustainability report here.
