Organisations must earn profits to stay in business. However, given the worldwide thrust on sustainable development gaining momentum each day, the volume of such profits is no more the sole benchmark for judging an organisation’s performance. Instead, companies are increasingly coming under scrutiny by media, civic society and other stakeholders on how ethically this profit has been earned and what the company chooses to do with it. The impact an organisation has on the environment and the society in which it operates are increasingly becoming the cornerstone for measuring its overall or total performance. The need to attain and maintain such total performance is prompting organisations, big and small, to think of ways of ensuring healthier ecosystems, social equity and ethical governance. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is therefore, fast becoming a norm in the corporate world.

A vast majority of current CSR initiatives, particularly those adopted by medium and small sized firms, lack focus and necessary planning and hence end up having limited or no impact. As a recent post on sustainablebusinessforum.com points out “a poorly planned and executed CSR intervention can be as damaging to a firm’s credibility than not engaging in CSR at all”.

With the eventual impact and accountability to targeted population segments as the core principle, a CSR initiative needs to be designed through proper planning based on feasibility studies, needs assessments and baseline studies. These exercises should mark the starting point for any CSR intervention for the organisation to be able to set out clear objectives in terms of the impact it intends to create and to identify measurable outcomes and indicators thereof. To help a firm in this design phase, a number of standards like the AccountAbility’s AA1000 standard, the Global Reporting Initiative’s Sustainability Reporting Guidelines and the UN Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI) have evolved.

Once implementation gets underway, it is imperative to closely monitor the impacts the CSR initiative generates. As the abovementioned article notes that all too often, while measuring impact companies lose focus and end up measuring internal impacts like improved employee retention, brand loyalty and supply chain efficiency rather than external impacts i.e., those on society and environment, which formed the very basis of the CSR design. The post refers to the Association for Sustainable & Responsible Investment in Asia (ASRIA), which in its website, lays out effective ways in which CSR interventions can yield desired external impacts.

Finally, the article notes the significant benefits organisations can derive by adapting their CSR initiatives to the guidelines and principles laid out in the ISO 26000. Unlike other ISO standards, ISO 26000 is not a management system certification standard. Launched in 2010 by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), ISO 26000 is a guideline for helping all types of organisations, regardless of their size and location, develop a common understanding about the field of social responsibility and the best practices therein and translate principles into effective actions. ISO 26000 addresses in great detail the 7 core subjects of social responsibility depicted in the diagrammatic representation below, citing CSR project case studies and assigning focus on CSR initiatives and opportunities in developing countries. The Discovering ISO 26000 brochure provides a basic snapshot and understanding of ISO 26000.