In today’s social and political context, expectations for companies to contribute to social change are high and continue to grow. A range of stakeholders—consumers, employees, communities, and even increasingly investors—demand that corporations do more as social change actors.
For CSR and corporate foundation executives, such demands elevate the relevance and resonance of the company’s CSR platform and heighten its visibility within the executive suite. It’s no longer sufficient to provide generous support to local nonprofits and United Way campaigns, though these are still worthy activities. Today, CEOs are asking questions that would not have been on their minds just five years ago:
- How can we support climate change mitigation?
- What are we doing to reduce racial and gender inequities in our business, our work, and our communities?
- What can we do about the future of work to make it more equitable?
- What can we do to meaningfully reduce harm from our business operations?
As a result, we see that CSR executives are transforming their portfolios, shifting from primarily being a generous corporate giver to also focusing on addressing specific social problems. This shift challenges legacy CSR behaviors that typically channel financial support to broad thematic areas, but may eschew understanding and tackling the root causes of specific social problems in specific communities.
In our new guide, the CSR Strategy Roadmap, we share key steps and case examples from 3M, Cargill, General Mills Foundation, lululemon, Sleep Number, and Toyota Mobility Foundation to help practitioners initiate and transform their CSR strategy.
The Roadmap provides practitioners with a multi-step guide for initiating and leading a strategy transformation process. It is divided into three modules:
Each module has one or several steps that can help guide a portfolio overhaul or can be used as standalone approaches to address narrower strategic questions.
Read the CSR Strategy Roadmap >
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