Welcome!

May 2008

In this issue of our quarterly E-Letter, we take a look at some of the macro factors impacting the evolution of social responsibility in practice today, and the perspective of those charged with communicating and differentiating their organization’s CSR initiatives. With the cooperation of PR News, we provide a re-print of my article from their 2008 annual supplement, “Guide to Best Practices in Corporate Social Responsibility”. (PR News is published for the executive level reader to help enhance the business impact of public relations practice.)

How far we have come since the early years of philanthropic investment as the sole, acceptable gesture for doing good! Back then, other than a handful of all-too-familiar exceptions such as Reebok, The Body Shop, Tom’s of Maine and Ben & Jerry’s, the standard approach was to “write a check, promote it, and forget it.”

Now, an organization with a solid CSR platform may realize tangible, measurable gains in its financial performance and brand equity as well as a host of other essential advantages for thriving in this era of heightened scrutiny and accountability.

CSR, as it should be advanced today, must be a fully integrated, holistic set of behaviors that become ingrained as a values phenomenon throughout an organization’s anatomy and then be consistently applied at every touch point in the value chain. At Stewart Strategies Group, we define this strategic management function as the New Responsibility Paradigm. For more than a doing-good reason.

According to a recent study of 250 business leaders worldwide by the IBM Institute for Business Value, CSR is “no longer viewed as just a regulatory or discretionary cost, but an investment that brings financial returns.” The IBM report also noted that over two-thirds (68%) of those surveyed are using CSR to create new revenue streams and over half (54%) believe that their companies’ CSR activities are already delivering an advantage over their top competitors.

If your organization has hesitated to move forward on the scope of CSR investment that will bring many happy returns, perhaps it is time to dust off those outdated assumptions and learn more about what many market leaders already know in practice: The payoff from authentic, substantive organization citizenship is sustainable vitality - for your stakeholders, your financials, the communities your serve, our earth, and your legacy. With the challenges facing our global community, the world is rapidly accepting nothing less from all of us.

As always, we invite your comments on your experiences with launching and managing CSR programs. Please don’t hesitate to Contact Us today.

Art Stewart
President/Chief Strategy Officer

SSG is pleased to partner with Chatsworth, California-based LinkEdge Technologies, developer of the PointInsight™ Issue Management System. PointInsight™ is an Internet/Intranet enterprise solution tool that supports Stewart Strategies Group teams in anticipating, tracking, and leveraging the full spectrum of divergent stakeholder and marketplace issues impacting its client organizations.

With the LinkEdge partnership, SSG consultants may easily aggregate, monitor and integrate issues throughout their lifecycle within a robust application that seamlessly centralizes all of a client’s issue priorities by any number of characteristics - such as stakeholder group and their corresponding values, policy framework, brand domain and competitive universe.

The PointInsight™ system advances the supporting functionality of Stewart Strategies Group client programs in Thought Leadership, Issues Strategy and Management, and Social Responsibility by adding an innovative technological backbone to the firm’s consulting expertise and experience. SSG clients gain an uncommon competitive advantage in the ability to identify emerging developments impacting their organization or industry, and to take strategic action from knowledge that better equips them for success.

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