Charity begins at home
CO3 supplies PR and communications services to third sector organisations as well as advising large multinationals on CSR. We try to ensure that our client CSR information reflects best practice and is transparently disclosed.
Our CSR work also means that we come into contact with campaigning organisations that are interested in, or sometimes wish to criticise, the CSR credentials of some of the clients we work for.
May we take this opportunity to suggest that you conduct a short litmus test when you next visit the website of, say, an NGO that is interested in human rights. Is it practising what it preaches?
- Does the website have a published human rights policy?
- Does the website have a published environmental policy?
- Does the website contain a published code of conduct concerning its relationships with the government and the media?
- Does the website record the checks and balances it has in place concerning the accuracy of the information it disseminates?
- Who are the trustees and how can I contact them?
If the answer to some or all of these questions is “no”, may we take this opportunity to advise caution concerning any statements you read concerning its campaigning issues. Charity, after all, begins at home!
5 Comments
That is of course the communication company’s view of scrutiny. These days I think you would prefer to see what external assurance they have over their *performance* in these areas. Policies, as we have seen time and again, often prove to carry very little weight when it comes to reality…
Interesting comments about NGOs. Many charities do lag behind in their CSR commitments and publishing thereof. What they have to say is by no means deminished by this when it comes to pointing out the imperfections of some businesses.
When it comes to advising caution and practising what it preaches, where are all of your statements/policies? Have you openly displayed yours in full. All I can find is a lot of striving and two liners. Do you actually have the goods yourself?
We do have policies which can be found in the “about” section of our new website. We are actually reviewing these at present and will be publishing more detailed ones shortly. I think the point is that many lines of suggestion from NGOs focus on the lack of company policy in certain areas when the NGOs themselves fail to publish any either. We think that it is logical to argue therefore that this sort of suggestion lacks credibility.
We’d also like to point out that we are not a communications company. We are a management consultancy which also offers communications services.
We all know these kinds of policies really aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. We judge companies by their actions, not their policies – so why should NGOs be any different? If any the human rights charities I give to spent my money on producing a ‘human rights’ policy, I’d be mighty annoyed. We should judge them instead by how they behave.
Rick, your statement implies falsely that there is no need for campaign organisations to publish some clear evidence of actual ‘policy’. Rather, you propose that they ought to focus merely on action/implementation. Surely it would make more sense to advocate both a policy framework in all cases (which of course includes corporations, – the point here was to simply proffer that NGOs follow a similar line) and then follow this up with appropriate action, based on the stated framework. Companies that ‘talk a good talk’ but do not deliver on their promises should rightly be accused of some sort of corporate cover-up/spin. However, equally, campaign groups that take charitable donations from the public in good faith, but do not readily make accessible their respective policy frameworks are, to a large extent, guilty of the same lack of honesty/transparency that their day-to-day working attempts to expose.