The most important thing to remember when communicating with executives is to keep it brief and relevant. Even those executives who are very supportive of corporate citizenship have little bandwidth to delve into the details of company programs, but they still want to be informed.

Center members have recently been trading advice and examples of quarterly corporate citizenship briefs that capture the attention of their time-strapped bosses.  The virtual discussion, begun by a post in the Center’s online Member Community, has stirred a flurry of interest showing just how eager corporate citizenship professionals are to effectively inform their senior leaders.

In order to meet this challenge, some members report that they prepare a quarterly dashboard of key community engagement activities for the executive team. “Unfortunately, people often start and stop at reporting outputs or short-term ‘outcomes’ such as the number of dollars, numbers of grants, numbers of ‘activities’ we participated in or supported, etc.,” warns Susan Santos, instructor for the Center’s Evaluating and Measuring Community Involvement course. “In my experience, leadership is more interested in the value provided, or what we refer to as ‘longer term outcomes’ or ‘impacts’ in measurement parlance.” Santos recommends any results reported should be tied to their associated business and social impacts, such as maintaining or improving reputation or ensuring/supporting operations through community relations efforts.

It is certainly a challenge to send this message in a concise fashion. Some talented communicators have crafted a one-page document or a slide of bulleted highlights and graphical representation of metrics and goals.  I invite you to pay a visit to our online Member Community to see the examples and join in the conversation.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

“You can’t manage unless you measure” is an old saying that has brought numerous experts on sustainability indicators to work together and create the Community Indicator Consortium, a learning network of organizations and individuals interested in the field of community indicators and their application.

More than 200 experts from government, NGOs, business and community organizations attended this year’s annual conference, held in Bellevue, Wash., Oct.1-2, where the theme was “Community Indicators as Tools for Social Change: Tracking Change and Increasing Accountability.” Issues discussed varied from alternatives to GDP as a measure of economic success to linking community quality of life to performance measures. Read the rest of this entry »

Corporate citizenship practitioners often ask me – sometimes with an expression of wide-eyed panic – “how do I start to measure my corporate citizenship program?”

The prospect of measuring to what degree product is “responsibly” produced or “ethically” traded, for example, can throw many into despair.

There is no need to suffer over the impossibility of measuring corporate citizenship. Sure, ethics and responsibility cannot be measured with a physical gadget the way temperature can with a thermometer. But this does not mean lofty abstract goals cannot be measured. They can. Read the rest of this entry »

In “Beyond the Business Case: Measuring the Business Value of Social Impact,” Jason Saul of Mission Measurement walked a packed house through his model for measuring the value of corporate citizenship in ways that make sense for a company’s business value. Read the rest of this entry »

Ask a corporate citizenship person if their company really understands what they’re doing, and the answer may be no. They’ll tell you that their CEO doesn’t get it, and the business doesn’t appreciate the value of what they contribute. Some will even tell you it makes them worry about the future of their function.

They think the problem is that the business doesn’t understand the value of social responsibility and social impact, but they’re wrong, says Jason Saul, President of Mission Measurement and a member of the Boston College Center’s faculty.

“The business doesn’t need to understand social impact; social impact needs to understand the business,” said Saul. “In other words, social impact needs to prove its value to the business.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Sylvia Ciesluk, Research Associate, Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship

How are companies measuring various citizenship issues and how well are those measurements used as part of a strategy to communicate corporate citizenship efforts? Not very well, according to findings of the Boston College Center’s latest landscape study. Read the rest of this entry »