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.

• Continuously make your case for keeping/increasing your budgets. Everyone within an organization is fighting to maintain or increase their own budgets. You should do the same.

• If you are publishing a CSR / Sustainability Report, allocate at least 25% for it. My rule was always to use that 25% of the budget no matter how high it was in total. Some practitioners have different views and in the end is your own personal and organizational choice of course.

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The aim of Fabian Pattberg's website is to be a resource for practical information on the topics of Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the use of Social Networking for business and individuals.

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.

Challenge 1 : Change Your Pricing Policy

A blog I read last week (I truely forget where) was having a rant about state intervntion in markets to protect precious resources. Why should we need state regulation, the poster opined, when we already have an adequate mechanism for protecting resources : market price.

I won't bother to argue this point by point, suffie to say the whole rationale of a market economy is that price is NOT based solely upon production costs. It is based, in a pretty barefaced way, on how much you can get away with charging.

For example: a quick Google tells me I can pick up a wirelesss keyboard and mouse for up to £27. However a wireless RS232 connector (for monitors) costs up to £158. The technology isn't that different, it's just that RS232 connectors are typically business only items so the manufacturers ramp up the price.

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:

• Post on a regular basis: At least once a week but not each day. There is a fine balance in my view. And when it comes to CSR / Sustainability a lower frequency of posts each week gives you as the writer the possibility to focus on a topic or theme and not have to worry about swamping your readers inbox or RSS feed.
• Keep your blog design simple and accessible: I am not someone that is very inclined to read a blog post that is looking to ‘busy’ and is over -designed. In my view the content needs to be the focus. My blog is simple in terms of design and my experience over the past years has shown that this is the best way forward when you write about CSR / Sustainability.

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The aim of Fabian Pattberg's website is to be a resource for practical information on the topics of Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the use of Social Networking for business and individuals.

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.

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.

All week last week the reactions to this article from around the CSR community flooded in. People tweeted on Twitter, shared on Facebook and emailed from one practitioner to the the other arguing for and against this point of view. Some reactions where in support of Mr Karnani but the majority where criticizing the simplicity of his argument and absolutely disagreed with his assessment that CSR in itself as a business principle was flawed.

This is a list of some of the reactions by authors and websites:

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.

This was always something very interesting to talk about when you are at events or conferences and it was a clear sign of the willingsness of the UK government to show leadership in this area. It always made me proud to be living in the UK for some reason.

But now the new UK coalition government has so far not appointed a new CSR minister. And I believe they will not do so in the foreseeable future.

Yes, I admit the results/impacts of a CSR minister have been a mix of of successes and failures over the years. But this position nevertheless showed the rest of the world that the UK championed responsible business practice from a governmental level. And this is unfortunately still something which not many other countries are doing.

The big questions for then are: Are they correct in doing so? Do we not need a CSR minister anymore? Here is what I think:

The role of a CSR minister is important but for it to be more relevant then it is at the moment. its responsibilities and governmental influence would also need to change. The role would need to be empowered to be a clear and distinctive voice for a change towards responsible business practice in the UK.

The purpose of the function also needs to evolve in a way to include responsibilities for the range of CSR topics companies need to deal with when they are expressing their willingness to be more responsible corporate citizen.

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

In the last 10 years the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement stood for topics such as Corporate Governance, Environmental management and community engagement only to name three. CSR is being seen as the new business models for companies that want to be seen as more responsible organizations. 

So why is that? Well it is not just acceptable anymore to do a little bit of environmental management here and some community involvement there. Companies are expected to construct a sounds framework of activities that all enhance their responsible business practice. 

This article will outline a broad overview of the important elements for successful CSR practice within an organization. 

To give this overview more structure, these elements are all subdivided into the internal and external aspects of CSR practice. This differentiation is necessary as CSR has two sides to it: 1) The internal and 2) external perspective in order to be successful. 

The following main elements are important for successful CSR practice