Blog hiatus

I'm on a blog hiatus, and have been for the last several months, while I was applying to MBA programs. I have enrolled at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, so the hiatus will continue while I focus on my studies.

Thanks for reading!

Great Resource: PublicDecisions

If you haven't yet come across PublicDecisions, definitely check them out. They bill themselves as "the online academy for leaders and managers of public processes."

What this means in practice is that they offer a free monthly webinar and a variety of online conferences and trainings.

Upcoming events include an annual international online conference on stakeholder engagement in March, as well as mini-conferences on climate change and on health this spring.

Visit http://www.publicdecisions.com/ to learn more; they also have an email list, which I recommend signing up for.

Pharmaceutical Sector Report Released!

I've released the first Stakeholder Score report, which evaluates the engagement practices of the five largest pharmaceutical companies: Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Roche Group, and Sanofi-Aventis. To download the report, please visit StakeholderScore.org.

Best Practice in Action: Customizable CSR Reports

I recently came across Rabobank's reporting website for its sustainability report, annual report, and financial statements. Theirs is a great example of an engagement and reporting best practice: allowing stakeholders to build customizable reports based on their interests.

Why are customizable reports a good thing? Because they simplify information and make it easier to access. CSR reports can be a sea of data spread over many glossy pages, and it can be hard to find what you're looking for, especially with a PDF report. With a customizable report, on the other hand, stakeholders can build a mini-report including only information of interest, making it easier for them to analyze and synthesize the data. The ability for stakeholders to create a customizable report is one of 40 criteria included in the Stakeholder Score, a best practice guide and evaluation tool for companies' stakeholder engagement programs.

Having said that, on first glance, Rabobank's reporting site (see screenshot below) does NOT look simple and easy to access -- it looks more like a big, impenetrable database. However, with my first click, I found the interface surprisingly straightforward, and within two clicks I was able to find what I was looking for: information on Rabobank's stakeholder engagement, of course. : )



Another useful aspect of the interface is that the data is presented along many different axes - by geography, by product/service, and by customer type, for example. Not all of the top-level topics are clear to everyone (what exactly does a focus on "sponsoring" mean?), but with the variety of keywords, people can easily navigate to information that makes sense to them.

In addition, when you click on one topic (for example, on "Sustainability Report 2008"), the website responds by graying out any unrelated keywords. In this way, you can quickly see what topics interrelate, and can get a surprisingly insightful view into the company's CSR efforts from only the table of contents. For example, I can quickly see that Rabobank tracks its CSR performance in climate, energy, and human rights, but does not track performance in stakeholder engagement (another key best practice outlined in the Stakeholder Score).

I'm seeing more and more companies enable some sort of stakeholder customization on their CSR websites, though this is not yet standard by any means. It's a logical outgrowth of the social web, and I look forward to it becoming common practice.

Oct. 15 Webinar on Stakeholder Engagement

In two weeks I'm giving a webinar entitled "The Stakeholder Score: 39 Questions to Ask Every Company." I'll be talking about the benefits of engaging stakeholders, what best practice looks like, and how to engage strategically. The webinar will take place on Thursday, October 15, at 12 noon EDT/9 am PDT.

Key Takeaways from the Webinar:

• Definition of fundamental terms and issues, including stakeholder, stakeholder engagement, and stakeholder mapping
• Stakeholder engagement strategies that work
• A step-by-step approach to developing a stakeholder engagement plan that works for your company
• Guidance in stakeholder relations, relationship-building and communications
• An understanding of engagement best practice and how your company compares
• A package of reference materials that provides a guide to the Stakeholder Score

The webinar is hosted by AltaTerra Research. For more information or to register, visit http://www.altaterra.net/events/event_details.asp?id=74007

Sustainability Stakeholder Engagement Conference Summary

I'm back from the Sustainability Stakeholder Engagement conference, which was held last week in New York. A few of my thoughts are below, but I'd also recommend reading Perry Goldschein and Beth Bengston's more comprehensive review of the event, published at GreenBiz.com.

It was a really enjoyable event, with a great mix of engagement-focused topics and sustainability-focused topics. I spoke on the last panel of the event, which focused on how to engage communities (community engagement was last but not least!). Community engagement is such a broad topic, and I focused primarily on how companies with industrial facilities can engage local communities around controversial issues, using The Environment Council's work with the Rugby Cement Plant as a case study. Another speaker on the panel, from EcoMedia, focused on the community giving aspects of engagement, citing a case study involving fundraising for a local school. I really appreciated having multiple types of community engagement represented on the panel, as we were able to give concrete examples of how a company should think differently about its community engagement, depending on how urgent and controversial the engagement topics are.

The Sustainability Stakeholder Engagement conference also served as the first public debut of The Stakeholder Score, a best practice guide and evaluation tool for companies' stakeholder engagement programs, which has recently been made available for free public use. I'm giving a webinar on the Stakeholder Score in a few weeks, on October 15th; for more information see the AltaTerra website.

Sustainability Stakeholder Engagement Conference in two weeks!

I will be speaking on Tuesday afternoon. Let me know if you'll be there! Details below.

Sustainability Stakeholder Engagement, Sept. 14-15, New York, NY

Overview
Companies are facing more and more pressure from shareholders, customers and activists on sustainability issues including climate response, water use and resource management. Drawing on real-world examples and insight from activist investors and other stakeholder groups, this event will offer companies best practices in multi-stakeholder engagement on sustainability issues.

Speakers Include:

• Denis Abrams, President and CEO, Benjamin Moore
• Dave Rapaport, Sr. Director, Corporate Consciousness, Seventh Generation
• Mary Powell, President and Chief Executive Officer, Green Mountain Power
• Rob Reed, CEO and Founder, Max Gladwell
• Richard Seireeni, Author, The Gort Cloud, and Founder and Director of The Brand Architect Group
• Ed Klein, VP of Environmental Affairs, TetraPak

Key Reasons to Attend:

• Hear the latest case studies from corporate leaders in stakeholder engagement
• Find out how to use social media to build sustainability credibility
• Learn why companies succeed and fail when engaging on sustainability issues
• Identify strategies for prioritizing stakeholders and their green concerns
• Plus, individual sessions on engaging employees, investors, consumers, communities and hard-to-reach groups on sustainability