3BL Blogs

When you target customers, it helps to know if they’re “dark green”, “light green” or “basic brown” in their attitudes, but, with so many green issues, products, and labels out there, it may be more relevant to your branding and communications to understand their personal green interests.

Ask: To which environmental organizations do members of our target audience belong (The Appalachian Mountain Club or Greenpeace)? Which types of vacations do they take (hiking or the beach)? Which environmental magazines and websites do they read or visit? (Sierra or Animal Fair?) Which types of products do they buy? (green fashions or energy-sipping light bulbs)? Which eco-labels do they seek out (“USDA Organic” or “Energy Star”)?

Today Southwest Airlines announced a new employee volunteer program- Tickets for Time (T4T). T4T puts a unique twist on corporate volunteering programs.  Rather than simply match donations, Southwest is offering their employees the opportunity to “earn” tickets for nonprofit organizations of their choosing.  For every 40 hours an employee volunteers, the benefitting nonprofit organization receives one free roundtrip ticket that can be used for fund-raising or transportation needs.  Each nonprofit can receive up to 6 tickets each year!

This program is interesting for a few reasons:

A while ago someone asked me whether my business card was printed on recycled paper. Yes, it is, I replied. Why, then, the response went, is there nowhere on my card a corresponding symbol to be seen? And, What if, when deciding whether to keep the card or do business with my company, a prospect tosses out mine because that sign of my environmental consciousness is missing?

My ultimate response boiled down to this: If a prospect makes her decision to do business with me based on the presence or absence of the recycled-content symbol on my business card, we’re probably not a good fit. My reputation and work, not symbols on my business card, should speak for me.

Many people involved in board-matching advise nonprofit board candidates to find the organization that "you are passionate about," and then that's the board for you!

And many people hang around on boards for twenty years or more, because, after all, they are passionate about the organization.

Choosing the right nonprofit board

In my experience in working with board candidates from businesses, I've found that most people have a variety of interests. And if I guide people in understanding the nonprofit sector and exploring options, they will often become passionate about certain organizations once they become acquainted with the compelling work that is being done. Sometimes, an array of issues resonate with candidates depending on their life experiences and personalities.

Look how many people are passionate to help in response to the devastation and suffering in Haiti. Yet, if you had asked them last December, most of them wouldn't have mentioned Haiti, or even natural disasters, among their top three concerns. They've become passionate about Haiti because they've become aware. And that's beautiful. But that's an example of the potential to light up passions by exposing people to needs and opportunities to help.

The business people I work with are usually concerned about finding a board where they can add value, just as much as they are interested in finding a board that serves a mission that they can care about.

Qualifying for a nonprofit board

Having passion alone is not enough

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Counting and measuring carbon, although a daunting and remarkably puzzling undertaking, is a fundamental skill an increasing number of people will need to garner in the effort to understand and mitigate the effect of greenhouse gases and global warming. Especially so, since the world population continues growing by quantum measures and all of those folks are going to need survival basics such as heat and refrigeration, plus multitudes of electrical extras, such as mobile phone and computer power, broadband Internet capacity, etc.

We applaud the development of alternative energies but add this caveat for all supporters: it will be an extraordinary feat if the percentage of alternative energy powering the world’s grid comes anywere close to reaching five percent of supply in the next 20 years.

That brings us to the subject of power plants. Here are some power plant facts, according to the PowerPlantCCS website: 

“There are over 50,000 power plants in the world. These power plants constitute the single largest emitting industry for CO2 emissions.”

One solution for solving this problem: carbon capture and sequestration, one of the reasons the PowerPlantCCS website was launched. The site provides a report, starting with CO2:

My recent reading of Dan Pink’s Drive has sparked some interesting thought around the purpose, benefits and unintended consequences of goal setting.  Traditionally in the business world, managers set goals and expect their employees to work toward them.  Typically the purpose of goals is to provide focus for employees and provoke progress.  However, goal setting can have a dark side and lead to stress, irrational thoughts and potentially unethical behavior.

Why I am posting about this?  More and more companies are developing and publically sharing annual Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports.  Included in these reports are goals such as “we will reduce our packaging by X% by 20xx” or “we will eliminate the use of X product over the next year.”  Upon first glance these goals sound great.  They provide focus and give companies (and often their suppliers) something to work toward.  However, these goals might also hinder progress.  Two thoughts…

Such goals put pressure on executives and managers to deliver promised results to stakeholders.  They want to publish in next year’s CSR report that the company accomplished the stated X% reduction in packaging.  However, this pressure may lead some executives to unethical behavior and greenwashing practices. Executives may get “creative” with the numbers, giving stakeholders the illusion that stated goals were met.  It is easy for companies to become overly focused on short-term progress and ignore the long-term practices that they should be implementing (sound similar to profit reporting traps…).

Unrestrained greed among the investment banking elite has been blamed for much of the world’s suffering in recent years. In a remarkable shift from only two decades ago, greed in all its crude reality, is no longer “good” in the eyes of the world.

Maverick thinkers have warned of the perils of unbridled greed for centuries, yet few were listening. Not until the world turned dark on September 15, 2008 in the perfect financial storm did the rest of society take notice.

That was a day of economic infamy-the day Wall Street investment banking died. Lehman Brothers, one of the most respected and powerful financial institutions in the U.S., came crashing down in an economic shock heard round the world. With its demise, the remaining investment banks went on life support resuscitated only by woeful government rescues.

With the crash of the credit and securities markets in 2008, the relationship between business and the public irrevocably changed. No longer is the old adage, “it’s not personal, it’s business” an acceptable view. The crisis resulting from the misbehavior of bankers at the expense of ordinary folks unequivocally reveals that everything we do in business is indeed personal to someone.

The official theme of this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland is “Rethink, Redesign, and Rebuild.” The unofficial theme could be called, “Greed is Ugly.” We traveled a long hard road to get here from the Ivan Boesky days of last century. With it, we endured a lot of economic pain. Yet as human beings we rarely change when things are comfortable. It is the advent of crisis, either personal or public, that forces us to reexamine our values and reinvent ourselves.

Four MBA classmates and I are sitting in a large, somewhat imposing corporate conference room at one of the world’s largest chemical and gas manufacturers.

In front of us sit 12 Director and C-level executives from our client company, and they’ve come here specifically to hear what we think – as MBA students, as potential employees and investors, and as concerned citizens – about their current sustainability reporting materials.

After four months of intensive learning about best practices in CSR reporting – as well as doing a deep dive into this company’s business and industry – we developed a set of recommendations that really centered around the following:

A successful CSR report doesn’t just tell impact – it tells stories.

Granted this is an oversimplification, but not by much! From what we could gather, it’s clear that this company is committed to not only reducing its own carbon footprint but also that of its customers. When it comes to being an environmental steward and good corporate citizen, this company is doing lots of things right.

Yet, all of this great work had been lost on us initially as readers; in fact, it wasn’t until just days before our presentation that we realized how stellar this company really was.

How could this have happened? How, after hours and days spent poring over their sustainability documents, could we have possibly missed the point?

It comes down to communication. While this company was obviously successful in its sustainability efforts, it had done so little to communicate its story that we’d almost missed it entirely.

With that we presented a number of recommendations on how to present content and provide context in ways that are engaging, interactive and customized for stakeholders.

Providing opportunities and encouraging employees to volunteer,  integrating sustainable and ethical practices into your products supply chain, and running cause promotions and cause marketing campaigns are all great ways of “Cause Integrating” your company. But why put all the effort into doing good when your customers can do it for you?

Enter into the the equation Disney’s brilliant new CSR initiative called Give A Day, Get A Disney Day. Simply put, if you can go out and get your hands dirty volunteering with a local nonprofit organization, Disney wants to reward you with a FREE ticket to Disney World or Disneyland Resort. Awesome? We think so. According to Disney,

We want to inspire one million people to volunteer a day of service to a participating organization in their communities. So we’re celebrating these volunteers’ good works by giving each of them a 1-day, 1-theme park ticket to the Disneyland® Resort or Walt Disney World® Resort, free. There’s no better time to make a dream come true for others and let us make a few come true for you.

Why is this so interesting? Here’s how everybody wins:

Armed with new research from the International Center for Research on Women, the ICRW, ExxonMobil, and Ashoka Changemakers are launching a new economic development challenge that they believe will be transformative in improving the lives of women and their families in developing countries. The World Bank calls the "business case for expanding women's economic opportunities...nothing more than smart economics."

The purpose of the challenge is to stimulate innovation, entrepreneurship, and non-traditional partnerships among for-profits, nonprofits, and local groups, to develop new technologies that will rapidly advance economic opportunities for women, their families and communities.

ICRW brings the expertise, ExxonMobil brings the human and financial capital, and Changemakers brings the tool--the business competition and the community of problem-solvers. "We use competitions to source powerful new ideas--sometimes from unlikely places," according to Charlie Brown, Executive Director of Ashoka's Changemakers.

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