CNV2-I2-2-Communication

“Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.”

.........Rollo May, American humanistic and existential psychologist

With social responsibility becoming a mandatory part of doing business in India, it is more important for businesses than ever before to do good. But it is equally important that the world gets to know about the good being done – and that is where the role of communication as a tool becomes vital.

Corporates are increasingly realizing the key role that communication professionals can play in the CSR space and are including them as part of their CSR vehicles – whether as part of sustainability teams or in the philanthropic trusts and foundations. How effectively these professionals are able to tell the story of a company, however, is defined by the context they operate in.

Understanding the Context

In India, where the new age businesses are yet to attain scale[i], the private sector is still synonymous with traditional businesses such as manufacturing, cement, power, textiles[ii], etc. To a large extent, the growth of private companies in these businesses has been attributed to socialist era protectionism and license raj rather than to pure entrepreneurship. In a relatively free market of post-liberalization era too, allegations of nexus between the business class and political class have not died down. As a result, the intentions of a for-profit entity engaging in development action are often questioned, most vociferously by the advocacy groups and activists typically labelled as ‘anti-development’. This means that companies are expected to walk the extra mile to prove – and communicate - their sincerity and long-term commitment to social development. For a communication manager, the task is thus well cut out.

The non-profit sector in India has long suffered from a lack of ‘culture of evidence’ and the private CSR foundations are no exception to this. Testimonials of a handful of beneficiaries, often unverified, are passed around as substitute for hard evidence of success at scale. In an environment completely devoid of evidence, communication material, no matter how smartly written, would ring hollow.

In India, signing a cheque is still the predominant way of doing charity[iii]. Companies not only have a much smaller share of the philanthropy pie than the rich individuals, but they are also hampered both by a lack of imagination and a will to take up the challenge of addressing the core issues affecting the stakeholders. As a result, many companies resort to purely charitable funding as against investing in research to find innovative solutions to problems, which may require significant technical input. In a crowd of philanthropic projects marked by sameness, good communication is all about focusing on what is different or innovative about a piece of work.

Thus, in CSR space, the communication strategy of a corporate player primarily intends to achieve three objectives: one, that the company is sincere about what it is doing on the ground; two, that its intervention is actually creating change, and three, that its work can convincingly claim to be different from, or even better than, the rest. Simply put, a good communication strategy should be able to score on all three “I”s: intent, impact and innovation.

Search for a Solution

Given the above situation, the all-important question is: how does one measure the effectiveness of a CSR communication strategy. This exercise faces a number of challenges.

Over the last few years, the corporate world has seen a rapid growth in the number of organizations that dish out CSR excellence awards round the year. While many of these award ceremonies serve as useful means of professional networking, conversation and publicity, the CSR space in India continues to lack a credible system of rewarding high impact programmes. Rigorous vetting of award applications is rare. Number of awards won is therefore not a good proxy for how well the company has done in terms of communicating its success.

The better option therefore is to turn to the indirect stakeholders to know their perception about the company’s CSR activities. These indirect stakeholders are primarily the company shareholders. They don’t belong to the disadvantaged sections of the society and hence, don’t directly benefit from a CSR project but get to learn about it through the company’s publications or what gets reported about it in the press. Besides, other indirect stakeholders include the independent directors, members of the media, non-profit community and those who the company may want to involve in future as partners, employees, vendors etc. The communicators need to engage with them and understand how they rate the CSR activities of the company. A positive feedback from them is proof that the communication strategy is working.

However, two factors that can potentially determine the opinions of these stakeholders are: the evidence they see in front of them and the popular perception about the company.

When it comes to communicating the evidence of impact, it goes without saying that in a CSR entity, all three actors – the implementers, the evaluators and the communicators - must work in complete harmony. However, it is easier said than done. There are three challenges the communication manager must combat here.

One, a lot of CSR interventions take time to reach a stage where impact is clearly visible and ripe enough for reporting. This is especially true for interventions that aim at achieving behavioural and cultural change. It is important that the communication manager does not give in to the pressure of staying ahead in the race for eyeballs and has enough patience of waiting for impact of such interventions to emerge.

Two, while reporting impact, it is easy to be a prisoner to theoretical frameworks – and there are many in circulation. But in a world dominated by social media where attention span of the average reader is notoriously short, stories need to be told in brief and simple formats.

Three, in an attempt to overstate the success of the organization, communicators often tend to report

[i] The E-commerce industry which was worth Rs.1257 billion in 2015, and is growing at an exponential rate, is estimated to be contributing about 1% of GDP (Source: National Report on E-commerce Development in India, UNIDO, Vienna, 2017)

[ii] At present, 70 percent of the manufacturing units are in private sector and more than 30 million people are employed by the sector (organised and unorganised). Also, of the total cement production capacity, 98 percent lies with the private sector (Source: Presentation by India Brand Equity Foundation, July 2017 and January 2018 respectively). Private sector accounts for close to half (46%) of the installed power capacity in the country, as on Aug.31, 2018. (Source: https://powermin.nic.in/). As of 30 September 2013, there are 1,962 cotton textile mills in India of which about 80 percent are in the private sector.

[iii] In 2016, companies accounted for 15 percent of the total share of private philanthropy, down from 30 percent in 2011 (Source: India Philanthropy Report, 2017 by Bain & Co.).

Prasann Thatte, Head, Monitoring & Evaluation, Reliance Foundation, Mumbai