|
The New Corporate Citizen Communications: Spin or Transformation?
Is There Really Any Choice?
by Bradley K. Googins, Ph.D., Executive Director, Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship
March 2008
 I can’t imagine anyone operating in the corporate citizenship arena not seeing the fundamental transformation corporate citizenship has undergone in the past few years.
I am not simply referring to the incredible rush to environmental sustainability headlined by "An Inconvenient Truth," which certainly created a mobilizing buzz in many companies. I am also referring to many other signs of transformation: the rise of multinational intermediaries such as the Global Reporting Initiative and the United Nations Global Compact, the move to strategic philanthropy, the social reporting phenomenon, the creation of new corporate citizenship positions, and the development of organizational teams around an integrated and aligned citizenship.
This transformation, which is in its early stages, has been marked by a new focus on corporate citizenship communications, both by internal communication groups and paralleled by a rise of communications firms eager to focus on corporate citizenship practice. Sixteen percent of respondents to The Center's recent Profile of the Practice study say that corporate citizenship is located in the communications department. (Read more about the study in this month's article, Where Does Corporate Citizenship Belong?)
This may be because communication has been rediscovered as an essential ingredient for corporate citizenship, as evidenced by the rise of stakeholder dialogues, social and environmental reports, reputation and brand tied to citizenship, and the increasing power of media. A second explanation may be that corporate communications has seen a need to reinvent and reframe its role in the company.
Corporate communications has its roots in a public relations approach that sought to present the best face of the company and to address critical and sensitive issues in a favorable light that minimized damage to brand and reputation.
But as John Freidman of the Sustainable Business Network of Washington recently declared in his monograph, The New PR, the real challenge for those in the communication space is to replace spin with transparency.
While many may be tempted to frame this as a communication challenge, I suggest that it is significantly deeper and more profoundly tied to organizational transformation.
Transforming at the organization level is very difficult no matter what the driver. Many of us can remember the transformation around quality and total quality management that swept through American business a few decades ago. While every company wanted to associate its brand with quality, it was not simply adopting a slogan – it required extensive processes and management to inculcate quality into the fiber of the business.
In a similar way, communications has to be linked to substantial organizational structures and policies that can ensure the end product is more than an aspiration or well designed advertising campaign.
So as communications groups and firms take up the corporate citizenship challenge, they must have an accompanying organizational consistency and authenticity. At the same time they need to see how difficult it is to make this organizational transformation.
An attempt by the United Way of America (UWA) to transform itself provides helpful insight into this challenge. About five years ago UWA decided to repurpose its mission from being an organization that collects and disperses money to address critical community social issues, to an organization that would focus on making an impact on the issues themselves. While these aims were laudatory and universally adopted by the organization, the actual transformation has not been easy. Measures of success, competencies, and the deep messages that flow through any organizational culture all conspire to weaken transformation. While there has been much progress against the aspiration, the lessons for those trying to transform corporate citizenship communication are instructive. Unless the whole organization understands and believes in the changes, there is little likelihood that any meaningful change will occur.
Communication today bumps up against a transparency fueled by such social networking sites as Google, YouTube and MySpace. These new technologies not only keep the truth front and center, they also ensure that spin alone cannot effectively represent corporate interest and brand value.
Companies and their communications need to move from traditional public relations to a process that can incorporate less spin and more authenticity. There is no choice in this matter; the presence of the Internet precludes any other option.
That deeper organizational change has to take place to ensure a genuine and believable message is not in doubt.
It will be imperative to learn from others what has worked and what techniques are essential to ensure a company wide adoption and transformation. This will require a collective process, not simply the work of the communications group. It will require a collective vision and a unified effort that can speak as one voice, and act and behave in accordance with the values and claims of the firm.
Not an easy task for any organization, but essential if the new PR is going to be anything more than the new spin.
View more March 2008 articles > |
