Fabian Pattberg's blog

How to keep your CSR / Sustainability budget

If you are a CSR / Sustainability professional you will most likely face the challenge of making most of the budget you have available for the year. Especially in bad economic times, budgets are likely to be cut and keeping your budget for your CSR / Sustainability projects and practices is not always as straight forward as it might seem.

Here are some tips I would like to give you from when I was in charge of the CSR / Sustainability budget working as the CSR Manager for a multinational.

Four CSR Challenges for Sustainable Businesses

Written by Chris Milton

We have become so used to the way business has been done for the last 50 years or so it's often difficult to break out of the mindset and look at what is unsustainable and how we can fix it.

Four pieces of news from the past few weeks have set me thinking, and below are my conclusions. These I offer up as four challenges for CSR businesses, ways in which they can truely change the paradigm of business to a more sustainable model.

My lessons learned: What to expect from a good CSR / Sustainability blog

I have been running this blog since early 2008 now. It started as a collection of personal thoughts and events but ever since I started to write a little more about CSR / Sustainability I also had to make sure I am listing to my readers enough to get an interesting discussion going.

The topic of this post is to provide you with some of the these lessons I learned over the past years when it comes to my blog design, the content and what my readers are looking for:

Can NGO’s be the only organisational thought leaders in the CSR / Sustainability field?

The social media / tech world was taken by surprise last week when Techcrunch (one of the largest tech / social media blogs globally) announced that it has been acquired by AOL. Immediately the future editorial independence of Techcrunch was questioned now being a part of the AOL empire. Rightly so in my view.

The strong voice of the CSR community

It is now exactly 7 days ago that a storm in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) world broke out over an article by Aneel Karnani published in the Wall Street Journal titled: ”The case against Corporate Social Responsibility”.

In the article he argued that the idea of companies having a duty to address social ills is not just flawed but that it also makes it more likely that we’ll ignore the real solutions to these problems.

The UK sees no need in a CSR Minister anymore

A CSR minister has been part of the UK government for 10 years now right after Tony Blair's government created the first minister responsible to promote CSR and responsible business practices in the UK. Since then there have been 7 CSR ministers doing this job.

Sustainability Activist, Influencer or Observer? What are you?

What kind of Sustainability person are you? The question I wanted to pose to you today is whether you believe you are an Activist, Influencer or Observer when you are looking to promote Sustainability? ( I am assuming that you care about our planet, responsible business practice i.e. Sustainability because you are reading this).

I feel that this differentiation is very important in the context of Sustainability and making a difference in this world to change it for the better. Each of these three categories imply positives and negatives in my opinion and I have outlined what I mean with each of these categories below:

Activist
Activists are people that are especially active, vigorous advocates of a sustainability cause. They do what they say in a way that is not always acceptable for the general public.  They shock or break the laws in order to get attention for the cause they are support. This can be positive or negative depending of the persons viewpoint. Activism is very controversial and highly sensible. Do not get me wrong. We need activists but they have a certain extremism which many people can not relate to easily. Examples obviously include the Green NGO’s such as Greenpeace, etc in this world.

Influencer

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Fabian Pattberg

I first started out in the corporate sustainability / CSR field 8 years ago working in business environments for companies such as Futerra, AccountAbility and E.ON UK all on sustainability / CSR related topics. At the beginning of 2008 I started my own Sustainability / CSR consulting business with the purpose to help my clients to (1) manage the production of their sustainability / CSR reports, (2) to plan and coordinate on-and offline stakeholder engagement campaigns and (3) advise them on an appropriate CSR strategy / implementation / communication and subsequent use of social media. I am also the owner of the largest independent Sustainability and  Environmental Discussion Forum called TheEnvironmentSite.org.