How to Deliver the CSR Strategy Your Stakeholders Want - Your 3-Step Roadmap

We've said it before, and we'll say it again – your stakeholders are keeping a keen eye on your CSR performance right now and being able to monitor and report your successes accurately is of enormous commercial benefit.  But how do you measure whether your CSR strategy is aligned to the requirements of these stakeholders?

Firstly, an innate understanding of what your employees, customers and investors view as the most important CSR behaviours to demonstrate is vital. We've invested in delivering client insight on this front and recently published our YouGov survey findings, which unearthed some surprising intelligence to inform your CSR direction.

You can download the full survey results for FREE here>

The next step is to throw a spotlight on your own business and your supply chain.  Happily, companies can now access applications that deliver sustainability and CSR performance insights for thousands of organisations, aligned to consumer expectations. So how do you go about propelling yourself up the sustainability and CSR rankings? 

Well, between us we are already sitting on a wealth of data concerning everything from carbon emissions to tax compliance, how businesses treat their suppliers and employees and, as outlined above, what consumers expect from businesses around CSR.  Collating and analysing this data creates individual CSR scores across key performance indicators and rolls-up to an overall score for your organisation and each of your suppliers.

Here is our 3-step roadmap to measuring your performance and aligning your CSR strategy with the requirements of your stakeholders:

1. An effective recovery audit identifies and recovers cash leakage, but more importantly delivers the data required to assess your supply chain.
2. Supplement your supplier data with Barcanet’s proprietary CSR data and apply advanced analytics and AI to surface CSR performance data across your supply base and your business overall.
3. Determine the performance gaps against stakeholder expectation and develop an improvement strategy which can be constantly measured and monitored to ensure the results are being delivered across every element of your CSR delivery.

Why is it important to look at this now?

The drivers are considerable. In the UK, for instance, we've just seen the Financial Reporting Council announce that it is set to launch a major review into the quality of company and auditor reporting on climate change impacts and risks. The review will also examine the quality of disclosures issued under the new UK Corporate Governance Code (2018), which calls on companies to evidence how they are embedding culture and purpose into their business strategies.

Besides satisfying the regulators, CEOs have long recognised the need to prove their CSR worth. Back in 2015, PwC, in its annual global CEO survey found that a large percentage of business leaders believed that, in five years' time, customers would put a premium on the way companies conduct themselves in global society. In 2020, the same survey established that 74% of UK CEOs believe their response to climate change initiatives will provide a reputational advantage for their organisation among key stakeholders.

Be a technology trail-blazer

Thanks to recent advancements, the latest analytics and AI technology will enable you to compare your performance data against that of your peers and competitors, in a way that hasn't been possible before now.

Want to know how you fare in terms of the gender pay gap or the sustainability of your supply chain? You can use your business data to uncover this insight and, with the right technology in place you can communicate to stakeholders what you're doing to improve your ranking, in a clear and digestible manner.

This level of insight has great potential to be used in alternative forms of benchmarking in the future, too.  As stakeholder priorities shift and societal drivers change, you are enabled to respond quickly and credibly to the evolving CSR climate.

Talk to the experts

At Barcanet, we are expert at optimising your data and giving you the tools you need to uncover market-leading business insight. We can help you to transform your CSR performance in an informed and targeted manner.

To talk to us about any of the information in this blog, please contact hello@barcanet.com. We’d love to hear from you.

Ian Yates – Director, Barcanet