Corporate Citizenship – You’re Gonna Make it After All

I'm writing this blog post from a coffee shop in downtown Minneapolis. I'm here this week attending the Boston College Conference on Corporate Citizenship.

As some of you may recall, Minneapolis is the setting for the Mary Tyler Moore show. When I think of the lyrics to the show's theme song it actually resonates with the topics I've heard from many of the conference attendees.

While there are people here from a diverse set of industries, from pharmaceuticals to oil, retail, entertainment, technology and financial, we all have similar challenges and opportunities in our work. I even spent some time chatting with a gentleman from the Hugh Hefner Foundation. Ironically, he probably had the easiest to remember charter of anyone I encountered when he said, "their focus is on First Amendment rights."

Everyone wants to improve their storytelling. The book, "Made to Stick" was mentioned several times as a great inspiration for concise and compelling communications.

I can't think of anyone who spoke and did not have a success story coupled with a cautionary tale around cause marketing initiatives. The best example I heard in the 'success' column was by TELUS out of Canada. The campaign provided an app to TELUS Blackberry customers allowing them to turn their social media profile pictures pink in support of helping Canadian health organizations purchase mammogram machines. They blew through their monetary commitment to the cause in one day. So, they immediately raised their contribution and then hit that ceiling two days later. Their success was impressive and I appreciated that they were open enough to be honest that they won't engage in one-for-one matching in the future. They plan to use a range from now on. Two of TELUS' theories on why the campaign caught like wildfire were a low barrier to entry and giving the customer something tangible to help achieve a goal (the purchase of medical equipment). Here's an overview of their campaign.

Since we are in Minneapolis, we heard from Brian J. Dunn, the CEO of Best Buy, as well as several of their sustainability focused employees. I was impressed with the work they are doing across their entire company. Their new e-waste take back program sounds very practical and they want to be a leader on this topic instead of waiting until legislation tells them to do something. The team admitted that they were not sure how their e-waste program would be received, but it soon turned into a no-cost marketing program. Their commitment to their values and allowing their 180k strong workforce to be ambassadors on social media is a bold step and fits with their customer demographic

Brian talked about his own use of social media and he has a blog with a powerful video of Best Buy's new Shepherdsville Distribution Center and their commitment to people with disabilities. I have never seen a company of this size make such a strong stand to focus on their employee's strengths.

When it came to large global organizations, I was struck by how similar everyone's corporate socially responsible programs are setup and administered. From my own team at Microsoft, Boeing, and all the way to Abbott, the need to embed your Corporate Citizenship values and practices throughout your business is key to its success and sustainability. Anne Roosevelt (Vice President, Community and Education Relations) of Boeing talked about working across many countries and she said you need to have, "a country strategy and not a product strategy." This message resonated with a lot of people.

Jan Fields of McDonald's USA talked about their programs and challenges around sourcing in an ethical manner but what really stood out to the crowd was their plan to have a broad "Hiring Day" this month. They are looking to add 50,000 people to their workforce on April 19th. That is a staggering number and Jan shared some passionate videos of employees talking about how their "McJob" has really turned into a career.

This is my first time attending this conference and I have thoroughly enjoyed the connections and conversations I've had over the past few days. It seems that the people working on socially responsible business practices see the highs and lows of their companies at any point in time. So, just like the theme song, "We are gonna make it after all."