Companies with the best CSR programmes don’t need to bombard journalists
with PR, says Alison Maitland of the Financial Times
The media are often castigated for portraying corporate social responsibility in a negative light and ignoring the good things that companies are doing. This betrays a misunderstanding of what journalism (the serious kind, anyway) is about.
I receive frequent approaches from companies and their PR advisers who seem to think the newspaper should give them free publicity. They should not be speaking to me but to our advertising department.
What they have to say is often not new – lots of companies do charity sponsorships or run volunteering schemes. Stories about worthy but unexceptional community activities belong in the in-house magazine, not the editorial pages of a national newspaper.
It is also based entirely on their word. The journalist’s job is to find out things that are new and different, to ask difficult questions and to try to get at the truth by speaking to many sources rather than accepting what one source says at face value. The most important news may be what someone somewhere doesn’t want us to know.
When it comes to CSR, companies seem to expect journalists to suspend their critical faculties. They abandon the criteria they would apply to virtually any other aspect of business. Does their programme make a difference, either to the business or to the ‘beneficiaries’? How do they know? Is there independent evidence? Too often these questions remain unanswered.
Business also does its cause no good when it keeps CSR in a ghetto. No journalist will want to give wholehearted endorsement to a small training initiative in the developing world when the company concerned has just paid its failed chief executive a bumper ‘Golden Goodbye’.
So how can companies tell their CSR stories more effectively to the media? First, be sure that you’re doing something that really does break new ground. Otherwise, it’s probably already been written about.
Second, be open and honest about what made you embark on it, how difficult it has been, and what challenges you are still facing. Not even the most pioneering company has worked it all out yet. I am much more likely to write about a company’s efforts if it is prepared to admit what it has got wrong as well as right. It helps if this openness extends to disclosing who your stakeholder critics are, since this shows a genuine attempt at dialogue.
Third, consider ways to build your reputation without having to ‘sell’ your story. Companies with the best CSR programmes don’t need to bombard journalists via their PR people.
Finally, accept that all this is risky. Some media will accentuate the negative. But others will reward you for being transparent.
Alison Maitland can be contacted at [email protected]