Stakeholders want value, too

leveraging_corporate_responsibility

Companies have finally begun to understand the true importance of stakeholder engagement when it comes to CSR, and are now implementing various techniques to connect with these groups and learn from them.

A recent book - 'Leveraging Corporate Responsibility: The Stakeholder Route to Maximizing Business and Social Value' - goes deeper than any other we have seen in discussing this increasingly central CSR topic.

The main premise is that without a proper understanding of various stakeholders and how differently they may react to brands and CSR initiatives, many such efforts are bound to fail.

There are many valuable lessons in this book, but one particularly resonated with me. more

Let’s get creative with CSR communications

World of 7 Billion

The SMI – Wizness Social Media Sustainability Index was recently published. The report emphasizes the efforts that many companies have undertaken over the past year in terms of using social media for sustainability communications.

This report's findings are interesting to us for several reasons.

First, they show what we have known for some time: that social media has a strong role to play in the CSR field. Companies involved in CSR have lagged behind other corporations in their adoption of social media, but as executives and managers develop a better understanding of the medium, it has become clear that proper use of social media can lead to meaningful stakeholder engagement. more

#tweetscapes and Real-time Infographics

tweetscapes

Now there's another way to see (and hear) what's trending in the German-speaking Twitter universe. It's called #tweetscapes, and it's a preview of yet another coming trend – real-time infographics.

Here, the audiovisual representation of tweets on a map of Germany is based on a number of factors: the content of tweets, hashtags, sender location, number of followers, and whether it is a retweet, reply, or otherwise.

#tweetscapes is not the first artistic Twitter mashup, but it's the most immersive I've seen so far – and the darkest. more

Games and Accountability

gamesAndAccountability

For some light holiday reading, I picked up the UN Global Compact International Yearbook 2011. While it's not exactly a le Carré novel, it also wasn't all the stale drivel these kinds of publications usually are.

Particularly interesting was one article, "The Accountability Web: Weaving Corporate Accountability with Interactive Technology," by Bill Baue and Marcy Murningham. And no, I'm not just singling out this article because it mentions CEO2: The Climate Business Game that we developed for WWF and Allianz in 2010. more

Sustainability for Numbers People

graphMagnify

Two recent studies have given us a clearer picture about what sustainability actually means to executives and investors.

The first one comes from Harvard Business School, and it says that investors are showing more interest in non-financial information about companies. The authors know this by looking at what environmental, social, and governance (ESG) terms investors are searching for on the Bloomberg database.

For example, there were 2,395,230 hits for "ESG Disclosure Score" versus 606,998 hits for "UN Global Compact Signatory." Or 109,883 hits for "Total CO2 Emissions" versus 78,499 hits for "Fair Remuneration Policy." more

The NGO as Storyteller

Screenshot from the Urban Survival project

There are some encouraging signs that NGOs are getting better at telling their stories.

Last week, Medicins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders released a new Flash feature called "Urban Survivors" (big shout out to Mike for the tip). It takes us into the slums of five cities - Dhaka, Johannesburg, Port-au-Prince, Karachi, and Nairobi - where MSF volunteers have their hands full assisting poor and vulnerable communities. more

Shared Value Marketing

Credit: Luc De Leeuw

Apparently, green marketing is dead. In the past months, several media outlets have reported about the so-called death of green marketing, relying on studies that show that consumers are (still) not changing their purchasing behavior based on green claims.

Price remains the number-one criteria for purchasing decisions, so now we are being told that if your marketing message is to succeed, the green angle must be mixed in adroitly with price and quality attributes. more

The soulful side of data

Good Magazine's Data Issue

I was recently browsing a California newsstand when I noticed that Good magazine just published a "data issue." I grabbed it, and boarded a 747 back to Europe, anticipating a few hours of geeking out on their consistently great infographics.

But this time Good spun it all around; the issue is all about qualifying data. Instead of the colorful maps and charts I expected, the pages were mostly full of stories that explore and second-guess our culture of statistics, tracking, and ranking – "our collective obsession with data." more

Beautiful data: Is it worth it?

infographics

Is spending the time and money to produce a beautiful infographic really worth it?

This isn't a philosophical question; it is a very practical one for companies and NGOs: "Should I just pay a graphic designer to layout a PDF document, or should I invest in something more than that?"

Clearly, there are great infographics being made out there in print and online - highly artistic and innovative ways of presenting data.

Obviously, we think it's worth investing more. That's our business, so we would be silly not to think that, right? Luckily, we're not the only ones.

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Interactive storytelling at its best (so far)

welcomeToPinePoint

Who is on the cutting edge of interactive storytelling?

For my money, it's the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada. If you haven't yet checked out their groundbreaking interactive features like Highrise / Out My Window, Welcome to Pine Point, or The Test Tube, you're missing a glimpse at the future of storytelling on the web.

At least, I hope this is the future.

Although it's already free to anyone, the NFB has licensed some of its interactive content to media outlets abroad. Media channels without their own productions are using this to see if quality interactive content resonates with users, or as one Highrise producer suggested, to "distinguish themselves in a cluttered digital space."

What could this mean for communicating sustainability?

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Futurists, Rejoice! The Cleantech Revolution Is Here

Cleantech_Revolution

In 2003, Alex Steffen, of the now defunct WorldChanging, coined the term “Bright Green Environmentalism” to refer to the type of environmentalism that believes that innovation and clean energies are the catalysts needed to bring about social and environmental transformation. “Technogaianism“ is another term that has been used to describe the belief that technology can help restore Earth’s environment. Aside from a desire to live on a clean planet, what most of the people within the Bright Green and Technogaianist movement share is a fascination for the future... more