I’m not the first to make the case that crowdsourced social good contests should retreat quickly into the night. They’re inefficient at creating change; Their current popularity has diminished the value they bring to companies and brands; Consumers are fed up with them (how many vote-for-me solicitations do you get a week that make you feel [...]
The offer: As part of a publicity push for its carbon-neutral ENVIRONMENT Papers line, Neenah Paper launched a sweepstakes to win an eco-trip for two to the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica and a chance to ”go hard core and experience conservation in the heart of some of nature’s most fragile environments.”  The lucky winner is [...]
If you caught my poll earlier this week asking what areas you find meaningful in the cosmos of business and social responsibility, you know that I’ve been thinking hard about how to make the biggest impact. Â On one hand, there’s the CSR approach, which I’ll generalize as reaching more people but having less direct impact [...]
The Context I made my home on a 3.4 square-mile atoll for a year while I volunteered as a teacher and newspaper editor. On many parts of Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, a 120-degree swivel of my head would provide a view of the lagoon and the ocean. The beginning of this story [...]
This was one of the most educational interviews I’ve done. Mike is able to admit when he’s wrong, to explain the internal motivations and strategy behind his company’s social responsibility programs and to go beyond corporate sound bites. Click the player to listen to our conversation. Prefer MP3? Right-click and download. [Audio clip: view full post to [...]
On a wall in Honest Tea’s office is a Chinese proverb that cautions Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the people doing it. It’s a prescient warning given the story I’m about to tell, but the lesson I want to highlight is that when you invest in sustainability as an image [...]
What gets measured gets valued (as well as improved upon).  Tracking and evaluating the social return on investment (SROI) is today’s Plastics. It’s the future of sustainability–nay–the future of business. Period. While stakeholder demand for sustainability and the impact of companies’ actions grows, evaluation methodologies and criteria still resemble the Wild West.  There’s no standard metric and [...]
Click the player to listen to our conversation. Prefer MP3? [Audio clip: view full post to listen] With a deep background in sustainability and corporate accountability, Beth Holzman brings an appreciation for impact evaluation and stakeholder involvement to Timberland as the company’s CSR Strategy and Reporting Manager.  I invited Beth to Cause Capitalism to talk about [...]
There seems to be a problem. Â An influential group of global CEOs list brand, trust and reputation as their “primary considerations for acting on sustainability.” Â Motivators like revenue growth and cost reduction, consumer demand, employee engagement and retention and personal motivation lagged significantly behind. Many CEOs seem to have reversed cause and effect. Brand trust [...]
Dave Stangis, vice president of CSR for Campbell’s, recently spoke about third generation strategies for CSR and sustainability. Unlike past generations, which could be summed up with words like compliance and philanthropy, the mark of success for this generation will be cannibalization of the sector as CSR becomes integrated into a company’s functions just like human resources, finance or quality. Dave talked [...]
I'm Olivia Khalili. I created Cause Capitalism to show you how to grow your business by incorporating a social mission. 
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