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Many companies striving to be good corporate citizens today face an internal tug of war between giving attention to community initiatives that address social problems and the growing demand to make environmental issues paramount.
2010 Conference: Measuring what matters
By Allison Lee, Senior Research Associate, Boston College Center
The conference session I participated in, Measuring What Matters: Finding the Business Value of Community Involvement Initiatives, was packed, standing-room only. Not surprising, given that this is a major pain point for a lot of corporate citizenship professionals. I was joined in this session by Bea Boccalandro, a Center Faculty member; Chris Montross, managing director, Community Relations, Aetna and vice president, Aetna Foundation; Jane Coen, global manager, Corporate Citizenship, Underwriters Laboratories.
We opened the session with an introduction to the Boston College Center’s Impact Measurement project, touching briefly on the current state of measurement. Then we provided a brief overview of the draft measurement framework coming from the project, followed by a drill-down into the specific steps of the framework. The company examples of how Aetna and Underwriters Laboratories completed each framework step were clearly illustrated by the session speakers and really brought the framework to life.
The main challenges for the business impact measurement of community involvement include:
- determining exactly what to measure
- how to attribute the business impacts to the community involvement programs
- how to calculate return-on-investment.
But there are solutions for each of these challenges:
- sample indicators
- using non-scientific measures for causality
- conversion factors to calculate ROI
The key takeaway from the session was that measurement of the business impact of community involvement is entirely feasible and doesn’t have to be so difficult!
