Beginning today and continuing through April 2, Boston College Center members, or nonmembers who have registered for the conference, can vote in the Center’s online Member Community. If you are already a member of our online Member Community, click here to vote. Click here to learn more about the community and request an invitation to join (Center members only).

There were more than 30,000 views of the videos during voting by the general public. Selection of the winner from among the 10 finalists now goes into the Boston College Center’s online Member Community. This year’s 10 finalists in alphabetical order are: Accenture, Allstate Insurance Company, Amway Corporation, Campbell Soup Company, Consolidated Edison Company, Dow Chemical, Ernst & Young LLP, Fed Ex Corporation, ITT Corporation and Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP.

 All 10 of the final videos will be showcased at the Center’s 2010 International Corporate Citizenship Conference, April 11-13, at the InterContinental Hotel in Boston. The Film Festival will culminate with a red carpet announcement of the winner at the conference. 

The competition among the 10 finalists starts anew with the voting in the Member Community, as the first-round votes do not carry over to the final voting. Among this year’s finalist are last year’s winner, FedEx Corporation, and the 2009 third-place finisher, Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP.

At this year’s International Corporate Citizenship Conference, keynote speaker Nadira Hira will talk about how to creatively engage Generation Y as important contributors to corporate culture and productivity, on racial and generational diversity, and on the role of social networks in the modern workplace and in society in general.

As the baby boomers begin to retire, businesses are realizing that they may have no choice but to accommodate these curious Gen Y creatures.

These young people – self-absorbed, gregarious, multitasking, loud, optimistic, pierced – are exactly what the boomers raised them to be, and now they’re being themselves all over the business world. It’s going to be great.

Hira wrote Fortune’s widely discussed 2007 cover story on Gen Yers and their impact on corporate America. Her media presence extends to television, where she has been a featured personality on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” and ABC’s “America’s Black Forum”, a regular contributor to VH1’s “The Fabulous Life” and BET’s “Black Carpet”, and an expert guest on many major outlets, including CNN, CBS, MSNBC, CNBC, and BBC-A.

Hira’s message is just one more valuable element of the 2010 International Corporate Citizenship Conference where you will find solutions to your company’s challenges through keynote speeches, breakout sessions and networking opportunities.

For more information and to register click here.

The top six companies on the list are Boston College Center members:  Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel Corp., General Mills, IBM, Kimberly-Clark  and Abbott Laboratories. These companies are joined in the top 25 by seven other Center members , including Coca-Cola, Campbell Soup, Microsoft, Merck & Co., Inc., Baxter International, Cisco Systems and PG&E  Corp.

The list includes a number of companies whose rankings rose significantly from last year.

“Thirty-six of the Top 100 were not on last year’s list, evidence that companies are increasing their focus on public reporting and performance, particularly in the areas of climate change, environment, employee relations, and human rights,” said Corporate Responsibility Magazine publisher Jay Whitehead. “Between 2009 and 2010, for instance, the top company’s total score improved by 66 percent, and the average score of all 100 companies climbed by 19 percent.”

View the full list here:  http://www.thecro.com/files/CR100Best3.pdf.

Corporate citizenship as a field has gone through great change even in the past few years. Some years back it would be difficult to find anyone in a company with full-time responsibility for citizenship issues. Now there are new announcements of executive level positions created nearly every week. As time has progressed, and citizenship has become a more serious business concern, the types of leaders recruited have changed. While once specialized outside expertise was needed to manage stakeholder relationships and emerging social and environmental issues, today a career of built-up corporate expertise and internal relationships may be of higher value.

What will be the next trend? Will citizenship become an increasingly senior executive position? Will leadership in citizenship become a critical rung on the career ladder of budding CEOs? Or will more companies opt to make corporate citizenship leaders out of all of their managers, or all of their staff?

There are many factors that will affect the answer to this question. A new kind of young employee is entering the business world today. Several studies have shown millennials to be more interested and engaged in societal issues and challenges. Another trend of the day is known as “social intrapreneurship.” Intrapreneurs are employees within companies who voluntarily go beyond their job requirements to introduce new ideas, processes or products that contribute to the overall goal of corporate citizenship and sustainability. New “CROs” – corporate responsibility officers as they are becoming known – could be drawn from these ranks.

Whether it is ambitious new millennials, or seasoned corporate managers who will take up the torch, we need to consider how to prepare the next cohort of leaders for their critical role in advancing corporate citizenship goals. The Center has identified a set of unique competencies that are required to lead in this area, from enhanced passion and optimism, to savvy systems thinking and influence skills. Universities and business schools in particular are beginning to incorporate some citizenship topics and necessary skills but can we rely on these institutions alone? Some companies have created internal training and awareness programs to bring everyone to a common understanding while turning on light bulbs in the heads of those potential future leaders.

These ideas will be framed from multiple perspectives at our upcoming International Corporate Citizenship Conference in April. Come hear the viewpoint of Maggie McArthur, deputy director of Net Impact, a pioneering nonprofit that is changing business schools and MBAs worldwide. Armed with a fresh MBA and a new CSR role with Mitsubishi International Corporation, Joe Reganato will share his view from a millennial perspective. Also new to her role, Kathy Hopinkah Hannan, managing partner for Diversity and CSR at KPMG, will share a senior perspective as one who has come in to lead CSR from various other leadership positions and industry expertise. Dave Stangis, Campbell Soup’s vice president, CSR, will moderate this panel, guiding the audience toward developing new perspectives on the future of corporate citizenship leadership.

Don’t miss the chance to get in on this conversation about the corporate citizenship leaders of tomorrow and what they’ll need to carry the torch into the future. Learn more about the conference here.

Well, maybe you should have. That’s probably the advice you’d get from Dan Roam, one of the keynote speakers at our International Corporate Citizenship Conference in Boston, April 11-13.

Roam is the founder of Digital Roam Inc., a management consulting company that helps business executives solve complex problems through visual thinking.

Doubters out there may believe that doesn’t apply to their problems or their lack of artistic skill but Roam would beg to differ. He is the author of the international bestseller “The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures”, Business Week and Fast Company’s best innovation book of the year, and Amazon’s No. 5 selling business book. As he says on his web site, “I believe that any problem can be solved with a picture. And that anybody can draw it.”

Just take a look at some of the anybodies who have turned to Roam. He and his whiteboard have helped leaders at Microsoft, eBay, Google, Wal-Mart, Boeing, Lucas Film, Gap, Kraft, Stanford University, the MIT Sloan School of Management, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Senate solve complex problems through visual thinking.

Roam discovered the power of pictures as a business problem-solving tool in the 1990s when he founded the first marketing communications company in what was then the Soviet Union. With no Russian language skills, he quickly realized that his business pictures transcended the language barrier. Since that eye-opening experience, Roam has been fine-tuning the visual thinking tools he introduces in his books.

So don’t miss the chance to hear someone who can truly help you use a picture to tell a thousand words. Register now for the Boston College Center’s 2010 International Corporate Citizenship Conference, April 11-13.

The Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP) marked the day with the release of a new report, Measuring the Value of Corporate Philanthropy: Social impact, business benefits, and investor returns, that assesses current practices and measurement trends in corporate philanthropy. This report, which focuses on three primary conversations–between giving practitioners and grantees, between giving practitioners and the CEO, and between the CEO and investor community – aims to assess current practices and measurement trends, clarify the demands practitioners face for impact evidence, and identify the most promising steps forward.

Companies across the country planned celebrations, events, and programs to commemorate the day, including the following Center members: Capital One, General Mills, Humana, Intel, ITT, McGraw-Hill, State Farm, Verizon and Western Union.

What did your company do to mark the day?

Voting opens today and continues through March 10 for members of the general public to choose their favorite video and narrow down the entries to a top 10. Each video captures how the company’s corporate citizenship initiatives are having a positive impact – typically in partnership with nonprofits, customers and employees – on social and environmental challenges. Click here to view the 29 videos submitted and to vote.  

More than 30,000 people viewed the entries in the 2009 competition and voted for their favorite.  The Film Festival voting provided an opportunity for many companies to engage their employees in spreading their corporate citizenship message.

“Like any good studio would, we recognized we had a hit on our hands with last year’s first Film Festival,” said Peggy Connolly, the Center’s Director of Marketing and Communications. “So it only made sense to give the people what they want and produce a sequel, the 2^nd Annual Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship Film Festival.”

Once the top 10 videos have been chosen by the public, a secondary voting process will begin.  From March 15 to April 2, voting for the winner will take place through the Center’s online Member Community. All 10 of the final videos will be showcased at the Center’s International Corporate Citizenship Conference, April 11-13, at the InterContinental Hotel in Boston. The Film Festival will culminate with a red carpet announcement of the winner at the conference.

It’s not too late to register for the conference and join more than 500 professionals for the exciting announcement – and the popcorn. In the meantime, don’t forget to vote!

Is it ethical to refuse a child tutoring services in order to produce a report on the effectiveness of such services? Should you divert resources from programming to measurement when there are more children to serve, families to help, problems to solve and an otherwise overwhelming number of unmet needs?

If actions speak for themselves, then corporate citizenship professionals have answered a resounding “NO!” We have long refused to invest in social sector impact measurement, which measures whether a program generates the ultimate community change it purports to generate, because it means fewer resources for service delivery.

“We can’t measure whether our program truly makes a difference without cutting services,” corporate citizenship professionals often say, “so we just can’t afford to prove impact.” Faced with zero-sum funding decisions, we overwhelmingly choose more people served over more knowledge gained. We consider it heartless to favor an evaluation report over a child. Virtually every corporate citizenship program supports services. Precious few know whether such services make an impact.

Yet, how ethical is it to enroll an underprivileged child in a program we do not know to be effective? How respectful is it to not even bother to determine if the program is helping them? Services extended to victims of domestic violence for decades proved to be ineffective when they were eventually assessed. How can that delay in assessing those services – while thousands of women and children (mostly) suffered – be considered acceptable?

We expect our doctors to give us the probability of success of treatment options but we don’t give this information to those we serve. Paradoxically, by reacting compassionately to the needs around us we might be responding unethically.

The cost-effectiveness of our decision is also suspect. Based on the body of impact evaluations done in the past five years, it appears no more than half of nonprofit services generate the purported change – be it reducing high school dropouts, improving mental health or reducing crime – to a meaningful degree. By eschewing impact evaluation, we tacitly accept that half of our social sector investments are unproductive and that it’s acceptable to remain in the dark as to which half. Forgoing impact evaluation in favor of delivering services is shortsighted. It’s a commitment to activity, not to change.

We don’t pit activity against efficacy in other endeavors. We don’t build power plants before being assured that they will produce power. We don’t put MRI machines in every hospital before being reasonably certain that they will work. We don’t mass produce brooms that haven’t been shown to sweep dust. R&D departments, pilot studies and beta tests are testaments to our willingness to invest the bulk of our resources in testing of effectiveness.

Yet, when it comes to corporate citizenship, we are hesitant to spend a meaningful proportion of a project’s budget on evaluation – even if it’s the only way to obtain evidence of its effectiveness. As a result, we support programs, toolkits, services and other “solutions” without knowing if they solve anything. Ensuring that our corporate citizenship actually works should be our first order of business even if – for a period of time, at least – it swallows a considerable amount of our corporate citizenship resources.

I do not advocate that we allow the homeless man to go hungry and unsheltered on a cold night while we perfect a job-training curriculum. It is a human instinct and a moral obligation to respond to suffering, independent of long-term impact. However, we should be clear about the purpose of our corporate citizenship and hold ourselves accountable accordingly. If we aim to bring someone in from the cold, there is no need to measure whether they are employed a year later. We only need to know that they are sheltered and warm. If, on the other hand, we design a program to employ the homeless, it is our managerial and moral obligation to know that it increases the chances of employment before we offer it to thousands of individuals.

If we are generous with impact evaluation investments, most technical constraints melt away. Longitudinal studies are possible. Control groups to determine causality can often be arranged. Measuring long-term meaningful change is within reach.

Once impact evaluation identifies what works, the need for continued impact evaluation is minimal, allowing us to invest heavily in those services that are known to work. Society has invested resources to prove that interventions such as vaccinations, reading to children and exercise work. We no longer need to track whether an immunized child will be disease-free, whether a student who is read to early in life will perform better in school, or whether a person who exercises will improve their health. A corporate citizenship effort that focuses on any of these areas need not spend resources on impact evaluation. It can dedicate itself to serving as many people as possible, knowing that the bulk of them will truly be helped. Unfortunately, these are exceptions. Most corporate citizenship programs have little to no assurance of their effectiveness.

Some pioneering companies have already made evaluation of their social sector impact an integral part of their corporate citizenship program. The Best Buy Children’s Foundation, for example, produced a research report, “Teen Voice 2009: The Untapped Strengths of 15-Year-Olds” that is used to help ensure Best Buy’s @15 TM corporate citizenship program makes a difference in the lives of teenagers. Furthermore, IBM’s Corporate Service Corps program, an international community service assignment for high-potential IBM employees, commissioned an independent evaluation in its launch year that showed, among other things, that most recipient nonprofit and government organizations reported improved leadership and strategic direction due to Corporate Service Corps.

Other corporate citizenship programs might want to follow the lead of Best Buy and IBM. For in failing to properly invest in impact evaluation, we are likely squandering our corporate citizenship investments, the hopes of those we mean to help and the opportunity to maximize social sector benefits.

Impact evaluation is not a luxury. It is a neglected necessity that can elevate corporate citizenship to unprecedented efficacy and higher moral grounding.

Once again 2009 was a banner year for CTA, bringing in higher participation levels than in years past. In total, the 2009 program included more than 1,400 employees taking part in 64 projects across the globe. This is an increase of more than 200 people from last year representing more than 5,500 volunteer hours given to help local organizations.

As a global company with offices in more than 46 countries, CA has supported the communities where its employees live and work since it began 30 years ago. CA’s vice-president of communications and community affairs, Anne Marie Agnelli, who joined the company in late 2003, has been working to make its community affairs more strategic and to tie it back to employee engagement.

CA Together, the company’s global community relations program, is driven by a core philanthropic focus on improving educational opportunities for underserved children and young people. The program encompasses employee giving programs, community grants, IT program offerings and corporate contributions.

CA also supports a limited number of organizations and programs in the areas of health and human services, arts and culture, and the environment. Through strategic partnerships with a limited number of nonprofit organizations, CA can provide significant resources to achieve long-term and meaningful results.

“One of the hallmarks of a great company is just how much its employees give back to the communities in which they serve. Volunteerism is strongly supported at CA, and each year our employees rise to the occasion and give more and more of their time to help those in need,” said Bill Hughes, Corporate SVP, Global Communications for CA. “In a very challenging economic environment, we are gratified that CA employees have given so much of their time individually and collectively to make so many local communities around the world better places to live.”