Author Archives: Tim Purcell

An interesting discussion appeared in the Financial Times on 31 December which many people will have missed due to the date of publication. It suggested that the tactics employed by campaigning NGOs which are directed at large multinationals are becoming increasingly sophisticated and businesslike. The author was Hugh Williamson, the paper’s European News Editor. The [...]

Adam, Hayley, Roger, Tim and William would like to wish our clients, our partners, and the visitors to our website, a very happy new year.

We’d like to take this opportunity to use the CO3 blog to highlight this discussion piece written by Dai Powell of HCT Group.  HCT are a client of CO3 and we know the organisation well. It discusses, in a particularly erudite manner, how the UK trade union movement has failed to understand or embrace the [...]

The recent news that Nestlé plans to coat a proportion of their Kit Kats in Fair Trade chocolate, discussed a few days ago in the CO3 blog, has raised an interesting point. It is clear that opponents of the company, such as the Baby Milk Action campaign, feel that this decision is a PR ploy. [...]

The news that Nestlé has decided to coat Kit Kat, which has been the UK’s favourite chocolate bar for as long as anyone can remember, in Fair Trade chocolate didn’t surprise us in CO3 world. In a refreshingly honest radio interview this morning, a representative of the company explained the bottom line. This decision is [...]

The CO3 award goes to the wonderfully named Julie’s Bicycle .
We’re a fan of cross-industry CSR initiatives and have worked, in the past, with one of the best known ones. This, however, has a more formal name and is known as the International Council on Mining and Metals or ICMM to their friends.
We discovered Julie’s [...]

One of the things we have always found a little depressing about the “CSR sector” in which we are bracketed is the failure of many practitioners within it to coherently articulate the importance of CSR concepts. The results of this state of affairs is more confusion, not less, about the what, why, and how [...]

Tomorrow evening I shall be speaking in front of 150 MBA students at the launch of the Net Impact Chapter at Leeds University Business School (UK). Net Impact’s mission is “to make a positive impact on society by growing and strengthening a community of new leaders who use the power of business to make a [...]

You may have forgotten but in the UK there is a registered charity called Business In The Community. It describes itself as a membership organisation that “mobilises business for good”. It has significant resources – an income in the region of £23m and around 350 employees.
Seen as something as a [...]

Both leading UK political parties have had a considerable amount to say recently about CSR related matters. This has particularly focused on the banking sector and, occasionally, matters such as climate change.
I recall that, a few years ago, the British government allocated a CSR portfolio responsibility to Stephen Timms. He, along with his [...]