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For the last four years Center member CA, Inc. has sponsored CA Together in Action (CTA), a month-long program to support non-profit organizations around the world. Launched in 2006 as a two-week event, the program expanded to a month to allow as many employees as possible to participate. 
Updating the Standards of Excellence
By Allison Lee
I’ve had the pleasure of working with the Community Involvement Leadership Roundtable for the last few months, and we’ve been working on an exciting project: updating the Boston College Center’s Standards of Excellence in Corporate Community Involvement.
The original Standards of Excellence, which were created more than 10 years ago, outlined seven management practices, processes, and policies that set a global standard for excellence in corporate community involvement.
Given the major changes in community involvement in the past decade, the original Standards are now vastly out of date. Community involvement has become more strategic; what used to be just writing a check has now evolved to become companies leveraging their skills and resources.
The Community Involvement Leadership Roundtable is the perfect venue for updating the Standards. Conceived as a collaboration between the Boston College Center and current and future leaders in corporate community involvement, the Roundtable is an ongoing forum for:
- Identifying and understanding critical social issues
- Reviewing changing public policy and public expectations
- Developing new and more effective community involvement strategies
- Creating and promoting the adoption of new standards of excellence in community involvement
The Roundtable brings together companies that take an active social engagement role and that can provide leadership to the broader community involvement field. Comprised of about 20 members from a range of industries, the Roundtable typically meets two or three times a year.
In previous meetings the Roundtable has focused on critical external issues such as economic inequality, climate change and changing demographics. This year we have turned our focus to internal factors affecting community involvement and have taken up the mantle of updating the Standards of Excellence and its companion diagnostic tool, a questionnaire designed to help companies assess their performance in the community involvement space.
As the Roundtable members work to update the Standards to reflect a more sophisticated approach to community involvement, they are not only adapting them for the present but for the future, reflecting an ideal vision for community involvement in years to come.
The categories for the new, revamped Standards of Excellence are:
- Leadership
- Strategy
- Relationship Building
- Execution
- Measurement and Evaluation
- Communications
We wish to thank the following Roundtable members, each of whom had an important role in developing the new Standards and pushing them forward:
- Joyce Witte, EnCana Oil & Gas, Inc.
- Karen Ross, Embarq
- Kate McAlister, Itron Inc.
- Randy Williams, American Century Investments
- Carolin Irvin and Patricia Garris, State Farm Insurance Companies
- Lynn Biros, Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Feedback wanted
Now that the new Standards of Excellence have been drafted we are seeking your feedback. If you are a Center member, we invite you to download the draft Standards document, which includes detailed indicators for implementing and meeting each Standard. (This is a downloadable pdf; you must be logged in as a member to view it.)
To provide feedback, add a comment below or email me at Allison.lee.1@bc.edu.
Our next step will be to incorporate the feedback we receive into the final version, which will be unveiled at the Center’s annual International Corporate Citizenship Conference March 29-31 San Francisco. A white paper and webinar on the Standards are also in the works.
If you would like more information on either the Standards or the Community Involvement Leadership Roundtable, please contact me at Allison.lee.1@bc.edu, 617.552.1552.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Thank you for sharing the draft of the updated Standards of Excellence in Corporate Community Involvement. This will be a great tool for individual companies to assess their own work and for the field to see where we need addition resources to be successful in community involvement. I’m challenged by some of the subtleties of the questions but realize this will help hone our understanding of our work. I also wonder about the impact that a change in CEO has on how the standards are being met, which begs the question of how we imbed our work into the culture of the company. The other influencer I see as a trend is the marketing department and the synergies and challenges with community involvement and business objectives.