About a month ago a UK national newspaper (The Guardian) published a piece on the UK public relations industry which had an interesting title: “PR firms make London the world capital of reputation laundering”. The thrust of the piece was that the sector should think long and hard about working for “unethical” clients to “burnish their image” and created quite a lot of, often ill-informed, comment.
CO3 is a management consultancy specialising in CSR and an element of what we do is to advise on client CSR reporting and related communications. We work with a number of listed multinational companies whose activities are conducted all over the world. We also work with one of the UK’s best known social enterprises.
We have given this area quite a lot of thought since we were founded. The problem with applying an “ethical” selection process is that there are subjective and wide interpretations concerning what is an “ethical” activity and what is “unethical”. Factors which affect this include individual political beliefs and individual faith issues. Consequently we think that it would be unfair and unworkable to apply this sort of criteria when assessing our client relationships.
Our position is that we will not assist a client in conducting an illegal activity. We will also work with our clients with the aim of ensuring that they are more open and transparent about the areas of their activities that we advise upon. Indeed, if we failed to do this we would be offering a rather poor service! There are plenty of examples of organisations that have attempted to “spin” their CSR credentials with the inevitable value-destroying results.
Feedback to our approach is most welcome and can be applied using the comment facility below.
