• Stakeholder involvement

Citizen participation and stakeholder involvement

Business leaders are increasingly concerned with how their organisations can grow and thrive from addressing societal challenges. The authors of this paper argue that effective CSR initiatives are those derived from careful analysis of each organisation’s unique culture, competencies, and strategic opportunities.

While the particular CSR practices that some organisations adopt might not necessarily be useful for others, many of the principles underlying them are applicable to a wide range of organisations. After briefly reviewing the history and nature of strategic CSR, as well as why many organisations are striving for CSR, the authors outline a range of examples of strategic CSR undertakings. The 21 exemplary CSR practices they discuss are clustered into seven principles for enacting strategic CSR. The principles are:

• cultivate needed talent
• develop new market
• protect labour welfare
• reduce environmental footprint
• profit from by-products
• involve customers
• green your supply chain

The authors say that these principles should not be interpreted as a checklist of best practices, but rather as a stimulus for designing financially viable and prudent CSR initiatives, given each organisation's combination of mission, resources, challenges, and opportunities.

The organisational benefits of strategic CSR can be substantial, but so too are the potential challenges encountered in making the organisational changes needed to implement strategic CSR. Five guidelines for putting strategic CSR into action are as follows:

• focus on CSR initiatives
• identify and engage relevant stakeholders
• grapple with inevitable ethical dilemmas
• develop appropriate metrics
• embed in senior leadership and with rewards

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