“Corporate social advocacy (CSA)… moves beyond CSR [corporate social responsibility] in that it represents corporate engagement in controversial social or political issues that often lack direct relevance to the company… Additionally, unlike CSR, which involves corporate sponsored initiatives that simultaneously address a social or environmental concern while benefiting an organization’s image… corporations engage in CSA recognizing it may not be received well by all stakeholders.” *
Corporate social advocacy (CSA) seems to be everywhere these days. It’s not just Nike’s support and ads for Colin Kaepernick; CEOs are taking stands right and left. WeatherTech CEO David MacNeil spent millions to thank the vet school that saved his pet’s life. Ed Stack, CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods, stopped selling assault-style weapons and limited other firearms sales after the Parkland shooting, despite fierce backlash from customers and the National Rifle Association.
Stack’s decision appears to be based not on business factors, but on the wrenching stories he was hearing about the shooting. One father told him that his daughter was just one second away from escaping the gunman. A mother told him that now every night she goes into her son’s bedroom and talks to him. Stack told The Washington Post that he considered getting Dick’s out of the gun business altogether.
Until recently, CEOs’ vocal support for such social issues has been rare. Now it’s everywhere.
And since many of you, dear readers, work for CEOs who might well share the passion of Stack or MacNeil, we figured we might offer some advice on how to test and evaluate the effectiveness of a corporate social advocacy (CSA) program.
** Interested in how to measure CSR? See this page for a guide to our coverage. **
There are 3 keys to doing CSA well:
- Ensure that it’s a good fit.
- Have a good, authentic rationale and a genuine, effective spokesperson.
- Measure against the objectives of the program.
Let’s discuss them one by one:
1. If the issue fits, wear it.
There have been numerous studies that demonstrate that if your corporate social advocacy efforts are going to be effective, there has to be a good fit with your brand. Otherwise they will be dubbed “woke washing,” the CSA version of greenwashing.
Research by Melissa Dodd and Dustin Supa proved that consumer purchase intent is affected by CSA, and specifically by the congruence of the corporate stand with the beliefs of the consumers:
Research participants demonstrated a significantly greater purchase intention when exposed to corporate social advocacy messages that matched their own attitudes toward the social political issue than when they were exposed to corporate social advocacy messages that did not match their own attitudes toward the social political issue.
In other words, the closer the issue for which you are advocating is to the beliefs of your consumers, the greater it will impact sales.
Now, it’s very likely that you’re running a corporate social advocacy program at the behest of your CEO, and it’s her or his passions which will drive the nature of the cause. And few CSA programs are started with the intent of driving sales. (Dick’s Sporting Goods did lose a ton of customers after its gun-control moves, but the business turned around in 2019.)
But if you have any say in the matter, make sure you align with, if not all your customers, then at least the most profitable ones. Not because it helps sales but because it enhances your credibility if you can make a logical connection between what you advocate for and what you do as a business. If you do something totally discordant, then it won’t be as effective at increasing support for the cause and the brand.
Therefore, the first step in any successful corporate social advocacy effort is to understand the beliefs and attitudes of your target audience(s). This may require surveying the audience, or digging into whatever market research data your marketing team may have.
This is, actually, my advice for every communications program ever: listen to your stakeholders first. And in this respect, CSR and CSA aren’t that different, except that CSR is now baked into corporate governance. These days stakeholders just expect you to be socially responsible, e.g., promote diversity, protect the environment, be ethical, don’t bribe people, don’t dump your toxic chemicals, etc. CSR is now just part of doing business, whereas CSA is specific to an issue.
Make sure you have a clear-eyed picture of the values held by your other stakeholders, particularly your employees and prospective employees. Having your talent walk out the door in a strike is just as big a nightmare as a consumer boycott. So use your intranet and/or employee survey to understand where their priorities are. You’ll never get universal agreement on any issue, particularly in 2020. But if you are listening and can get agreement from a majority of them, you’ll have a much greater chance of success.
2. Put a good face on it.
Most CEOs are used to the spotlight and would be the obvious face of your corporate social advocacy efforts. In fact, today’s most visible CSA initiatives appear to be the brainchildren of the CEO. Of course, that could just be the desired positioning, but perception is reality.
The problem comes if your CEO isn’t willing to go out there and speak loudly on the topic. If that’s the case, your advocacy will at best lack credibility and at worse appear to be just another “PR thing”—the epitome of woke washing.
For example, Google and its employees give away millions every year. But most people think of it as one of the evil big-tech companies, in part because for years its CEO, Larry Page, refused to speak to the media. While they have some wonderful programs under the Google for Nonprofits brand, few know about that effort.
Bottom line: If your spokesperson isn’t outspoken and authentic, you need to find a different spokesperson. And if you’d like to learn more about authenticity and how to measure it, read “The Organizational Authenticity Index: A Scale to Measure the Authenticity of Organizational Communications.”
3. Measure impact before, during, and after.
Whether it’s CSR or CSA, the process is almost identical. Read “How to Put a Value on Your CSR Program, in 6 Simple Steps” to understand the basics of measuring pretty much corporate social anything. What follows is more specific to CSA:
Step 1: As with all programs, good measurement starts with being clear about the objectives.
Say the word “impact” to a member of your senior leadership team and they think “sales.” Say it in the halls of corporate communications and they think “reputation.” Say it to the executive director of a non-profit and they start tallying the number of lives they’ve changed. Therein lies the problem with measuring CSA: How to define just what impact you want to have?
Patagonia is a purist: it calls itself “The Activist Company,” and has built a $1 billion brand around the concept. But sales isn’t why it does CSA. To quote from its website: “At Patagonia, the protection and preservation of the environment isn’t what we do after hours. It’s the reason we’re in business and every day’s work.”
On the other hand, whether or not Nike really intended to sell lots of sneakers from its endorsement of Colin Kaepernick is still a mystery. Still, it quickly figured out that stirring the controversy pot can sell a lot of sneakers.
And at yet other companies, social activism is as much about paying attention to the concerns of their investors and ESG scores as anything else. (Yes, I know, but I can’t change the nature of corporate leadership.) Here’s an example from Clorox’s Analyst Day last October:
Now more than ever, a broad spectrum of stakeholders, from investors to consumers, from customers to employees, are increasingly expecting companies to lead in driving positive environmental, social and ethical change, while ensuring they create and deliver value. Organized around the themes of planet, product and people, the new ESG goals pursue innovative ways to meet consumer needs, help to address some of the planet’s most pressing environmental challenges, do more with less, and do more to create value for all stakeholders.
So what impact you measure clearly depends on the goals for the program and your definition of “impact.”
Step 2: Once you’ve got consensus on the goals, establish a benchmark.
What are you going to compare your progress with? It could be sales levels prior to the start of your CSA program, the current state of your reputation, existing stakeholder perceptions, your current stock price, or the current status of the societal problem you’re addressing. Whatever makes most sense, clearly establish benchmarks and what metric(s) you’re going to use to judge success going forward.
Step 3: Track your progress.
Once the CEO has announced the campaign, or you’ve launched it, you need to keep tracking those metrics. Don’t get freaked out by initial numbers, bad press, or a little rough weather right at the start. CSA isn’t for the faint of heart, nor should it ever be undertaken with a short-term goal in mind.
But you’ll want to do some tracking so you can at least answer the concerns of any Nervous Nellies. Who will no doubt come at you screaming: “We’re getting our butts kicked!” Which is why you need to develop your very own Kick Butt Index so you can respond, “No, in fact, we are kicking butt.” Or whatever your data shows.
Once the brouhaha has died down and the initial media bother has moved on, take a deep breath and measure the real impact. First on society, and then on sales, reputation, or whatever internal metric you’ve decided on.
Ultimately your consumers and employees—and probably the majority of your stakeholders—will want to know what difference your activism made to the issue you’re addressing. So make sure you have good metrics around that issue. This can be problematic, because the desired outcome is often way beyond one organization’s control. So you might have to chose some proxy to measure instead. Take Dick’s Sporting Goods, for instance. They can’t measure the success of their CSA based on reducing the number of mass shootings because there are just too many other variables at play. Presumably they measure progress in terms of getting laws passed, or perhaps public support for new legislation, or increased awareness of the need.
And if—and when!— you do find that you’re moving the needle, say so. And get your CEO to encourage others to follow in his or her footsteps. ∞
* Austin, Gaither, and Gaither, Corporate Social Advocacy as Public Interest Communications: Exploring Perceptions of Corporate Involvement in Controversial Social-Political Issues, 2019.
