Blog

UK charity CAFOD, a relief and development agency, recently released a report on AngloGold Ashanti’s proposed gold mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In our opinion, it’s one of the better examples of NGO commentary/pressure on the corporate world, a real improvement, in terms of clarity and quality, over some of the similar documents [...]

Recent news around Canada’s tar sands, which are being used as a source of crude oil and have attracted a great deal of attention, made us consider the ways in which companies respond to the pressure put on them by NGOs.
Coalitions of institutional investors, including Co-operative Asset Management, have raised concerns with both Shell and [...]

A few weeks ago I was rather surprised to come across a project called Accounting for Sustainability which is associated with the Prince of Wales. Further investigation revealed it to be supported by the great and the good drawn from the UK’s accountancy world. It aims, apparently, to supply companies with a uniform set of [...]

UK politicians have had a sharp reminder this week, in case they weren’t already aware, of why it is important to take social media into account when designing a communications strategy. A campaign poster, featuring the Leader of the Opposition, has become the focus of a satirical website and online chatter which is lampooning it [...]

We tend to expect that companies and organisations that operate in sectors with significant social impact should be keen to communicate that they have robust policies and systems in place to manage related areas of risk and opportunity. This isn’t always the case. Recent activity in the UK’s health services arena has highlighted this.
Michael Parkinson, [...]

Today saw the publication of the annual Greenpeace survey into the green credentials of the electronics industry. It looks at the progress that the leading manufacturers have been making over the last year in managing their environmental impacts.
The scope of the survey has always been limited by the fact that it principally examines the materials [...]

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. [...]