Conscious Clicks™ Newsletter, Dec. 2009

CONSCIOUS CLICKS™ – The Newsletter
Vol. 7, No. 5 — Dec. 2009

In This Issue:

• Editor’s Note: Happy Holidays!
• Is Earth Day “Over the Hill” at 40?
• In CSR, Dialogue and Substance Each Inform the Other
• A Very Brief History of Sustainability
• Sustainability Requires Continuing Dialogue

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Editor’s Note: Happy Holidays!

It’s been a busy trade event travel season for us — we’ve reconnected with many old friends and met many new ones. We feel very fortunate to be doing the work that we are as we enter the holiday season.  Thank you for sharing in it with us.  A very happy holidays to you and yours!

If you are one of the hundreds of folks who have downloaded our recent white paper, Social Media Advances the Sustainability Dialogue, please let us know what you think — Beth is particularly eager to get your feedback!  If you haven’t yet, what are you waiting for?!

Also in this issue, our take on whether Earth Day is still relevant at 40; how we see the sustainability dialogue evolving; and our fun, unique and informative “very brief history of sustainability.”

To your health and prosperity,

Perry Goldschein

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Is Earth Day “Over the Hill” at 40?

Isn’t Earth Day in April, you ask? Why are you writing about it now?! Good questions — you’ll need enough time if you are planning to do anything special with your organization. Think about it — it’s already December and Earth Day activity should start a month before. That leaves three months or so to plan something brilliant, plan for its execution, and then actually execute it!

But, on its 40th anniversary, is Earth Day “over the hill”?  That is to say, has it run its course?  These days, for some leading organizations, every day is Earth Day, where issues of sustainability are taken into account. While one of our clients is planning something special, another company told us they engage in sustainability as an ongoing thing.

Not by a long shot!  While it may seem like Earth Day every day to some of us in the field, there’s a far greater majority we cannot forget live a much different reality than we do.  Much of that majority is engaged and educated by Earth Day in significant ways — the Earth Day Network claims on its site that “More than 1 billion people participate in Earth Day activities, making it the largest secular civic event in the world.”  What are you doing for Earth Day?

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In CSR, Dialogue and Substance Each Inform the Other

I just read an outstanding article on corporate social responsibility at Forbes.com. C. B. Bhattacharya, a distinguished professor at the European School of Management and Technology and Boston University, really hits some important CSR insights spot on.

Despite CSR’s increasing importance in board rooms and among C-level executives, they often “don’t understand the most effective ways to design and implement sustainability programs,” Bhattacharya says. As a result, “they can’t fully capitalize on the potential [CSR] has for creating business value, and they are achieving little with it despite all their interest,” he adds.

So far, most businesses have focused on the “low-hanging fruit” of CSR. They have focused on easy-win strategies or activities with direct commercial benefits, such as energy-efficiency initiatives. This misses the bigger picture.

What Bhattacharya says he is slowly starting to see is a “second wave of corporate responsibility behavior marked by a clearer focus on the total business value such policies can bring.” “To fully benefit from corporate responsibility, businesses . . . must start by seeing where and how key stakeholders react to a firm’s corporate responsibility initiatives,” which “involves moving away from a top-down strategy determined by the board to a richer process of bottom-up co-creation with stakeholders.” [emphasis added]

>> Read more . . .

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A Very Brief History of Sustainability

This article consists of a section cut from our upcoming white paper on sustainability programs. It makes connections and ties together some important background information on sustainability in a unique and fun way. We hope you enjoy…

A Very Brief History of Sustainability

By the 1960s, pollution of our air, land and water reached frightening levels. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio, for example, caught fire for the third time in 1969 due to debris, fuel and chemicals. This pollution often came from extractive, development and energy industries, but also from the vast and rapidly growing number of motorized vehicles, as well as other individual sources.

The people, their watchdogs and politicians saw this was not good for our natural environment or public health, and said “let something be done.”

By the 1970s, some of those people included early, visionary entrepreneurs like Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia; and Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, of Ben & Jerry’s legend. They recognized that business could be used as a powerful vehicle for environmental conservation and social change.

They were eventually joined by thousands of other sustainability-oriented entrepreneurs. Green America alone (formerly Co-op America), a not-for-profit membership organization founded in 1982, now counts nearly 5,000 screened members in its green-business network, nearly all of them small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs). These include such brands as Aveda, Seventh Generation and Stonyfield Farm.

>> Read more . . .

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Sustainability Requires Continuing Dialogue

A surprisingly small percentage of the general public knows that a corporate conversation around sustainability even exists, let alone that they can participate in it. This is despite the fact that many of the largest companies are spending considerable resources to become socially responsible and publicize those efforts. We discussed some aspects of this in our recent special report Social Media is Advancing the Sustainability Dialogue.

Grail Research recently released a study highlighting the fact that most consumers have no idea that companies like HP, Cisco, The Gap, Microsoft, Nike and General Mills are socially and environmentally responsible companies. Which was exactly the point of our paper as well – companies need to be doing a better job of communicating the good works that they are doing, and getting ongoing stakeholder input, for a variety of reasons. Silvia Springolo of Grail Research says it very simply: “The low awareness of these initiatives raises huge questions because companies are spending so much money on them. And while green qualities are very important to consumers, they are not being communicated effectively.”

>> Read more . . .

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***If you find this newsletter valuable, then please pass it on to any colleagues or friends who may benefit from this information. Thank you!

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Please do e-mail us at info@srbmarketing.com.

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