Glasshouse Partnership, which has a track record of working with clients to develop powerful ‘social sponsorships’, has been working with Hitz’s to promote rugby as a positive way of engaging youth from inner city London estates.

Hitz targets 11-19 year olds who are at risk of offending or already involved in crime, by using referrals from pupil referral units, schools, youth services, social services or the police. It works to embed respectful behaviour through the ethos of rugby both on and off the pitch, carrying out youth- work style sessions and educating young people to make more informed choices.

Results have been very strong:

• Crime statistics for the Haggerston Park area in Hackney shows a drop of 39% reported ASB calls during the time when the sessions are running
• Staff recorded a 69% improvement in behaviour at the sessions
• 73% of participants think the sessions have enabled them to control their emotions/anger
• At 75% of Hitz venues, at least one young person has progressed from simply being a participant to becoming a volunteer, eventually becoming a paid coach.
• 98% say they have made new friends from different estates, schools and areas

James Thellusson, founder of Glasshouse Partnership, said, “Innovative businesses are looking to use their sports sponsorships not just to build brand warmth but to deliver social change. That way, they can join up sponsorship goals with corporate and CSR objectives. Professional rugby has been at the forefront of this for years now and we’re delighted to be associated with them.”

Does sports sponsorship REALLY deliver any social value?

Political think-tank Demos started the debate with its report “Measuring up: the social value of sponsorship”.

The report details a new tool that Demos has developed to measure the social impact of corporate sponsorship, which will be piloted by Coca-Cola to analyse its sponsorship of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Sponsors, CSR teams and corporate affairs directors across the UK would do well to read it and reflect.

As Demos research shows, a third (34 per cent) of businesses want to measure social value but can’t because no appropriate model exists.

Being able to measure a sponsorship’s social value could change the game for sports sponsorship and revolutionise the way brands use sports as part of their CSR, charity and community strategies.

For example, having better metrics on the social impact would potentially open up new (or larger) pots of funding from Government, charities and foundations, who are interested in solving social problems who desperately crave evidence about the impact of sports based investments.

Adding better data around social value will create new prices and new types of sponsorship inventory, too.

It could also allow brands and organisations to link sponsorship to the corporate agenda in a much better way than is often the case now.

As Demos say: “In an era of increased pressure on business to demonstrate social responsibility, it is vital that the tools for robustly measuring and understanding their social impact are available. Good businesses can no longer afford quiet confidence about social impact – they must be able to analyse and report on it. “

Imagine a world in which business could use the same metrics to measure the social value of its sponsorship portfolio as well as its charity and community investments?

At last, we’d be able to put a value on the total contribution to society which business makes (above and beyond its economic contributions).

At last, CEOs and corporate affairs directors could start to answer critics who attack them for a lack of social responsibility and commitment but  in a more compelling and comprehensive way.

Seven years ago we set up a Parliamentary Community Rugby scheme specifically to highlight the social value of the work done by professional rugby clubs to the social policies of Government.

Over the years, the quality of the data has got better and better and the alignment between the investment the clubs make and the outcomes the community needs, gets closer too.

This year’s winners Bristol Rugby, Northampton Saints and club of the year Saracens were all able to prove real impacts and real value to the people and communities with whom they are working.

But data always remains a challenge in this area. So better metrics and tools in this area can only be for the good and Glasshouse Partnership, which has advised many organisations on their social and CSR investments welcomes the Demos initiative, warmly.

On the web site of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), which will take place in Rio de Janeiro on 20-22 June, there is a crowdsourcing initiative called “Pictures of the World”. Global citizens are invited to upload photos that represent a sustainable lifestyle, accompanied by a description. The site displays these photos as a photomontage or in slide- show format. Using this simple, effective method of crowdsourcing by collecting digital photos, content is harvested from many sources while awareness of (and support for) the themes of the upcoming conference are generated.

Moreover, a one-day event, “Rio+Social” is scheduled for 19 June, the day before the conference’s high-level sessions begin. A global conversation, it will take place both on the ground and online. Organizers and supporters of Rio+Social include the United Nations Foundation, the news and blogging web site Mashable, New York’s 92nd Street Y4, the communications technology company Ericsson, and the energy supplier EDP. Discussions in Rio de Janeiro on 19 June will be streamed live, and everybody everywhere is invited to participate. The social networking channels to be used will be announced in the weeks preceding this event. Topics will include how technology and digital and social media can impact the major issues being addressed at Rio+20, such as energy, cities, employment, food, water, women’s issues, oceans and disasters.

In April of this year, the humanitarian news site Reuters AlertNet launched “Solutions for a Hungry World”, a multimedia special report focused on ways to tackle hunger. AlertNet invited submissions from filmmakers, photojournalists, social entrepreneurs, aid workers, inventors and others. A clear call to action was found on the report’s web site: “Your mission: Solutions for a hungry world. Let’s build them together; share your ideas”. Following the mission statement was a list of categories to which the public could contribute: smarter food, different food, urban food, fair food, and moving food (e.g. food transport innovations). This initiative was designed to encourage the sharing of best practice. An example of such successful sharing is Farming First’s animated video “The Story of Agriculture and the Green Economy”.

Food manufacturers are also engaging in crowdsourcing in order to innovate everything from individual product offers to their entire supply chains. For instance, Unilever hosted a 24-hour global dialogue called a “Sustainable Living Lab” in late April 2012 which allowed registered stakeholders to engage with them around all aspects of their business impacts.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s “Grand Challenges Explorations” uses what could also be thought of as crowdsourcing. The Foundation has committed US$100 million to encourage scientists to “expand the pipeline of ideas” to fight the world’s greatest health challenges. Since 2008, Grand Challenge Explorations grants have been awarded to 602 people from 44 countries. The grant programme is open to anyone from any discipline, from students to tenured professors, and from any organization (including colleges and universities, government laboratories, research institutions, non-profit organizations and for-profit companies.

Grand Challenge Explorations features what its web site describes as an “agile, accelerated grant-making process”. Short, two-page applications for innovative projects may be submitted without any preliminary data. Applications are submitted online, and winners are chosen approximately four months after the deadline for submissions. Initial grants of US$100,000 are awarded twice a year. If projects are successful, an additional follow-up grant of up to US$1 million may be awarded.

What these examples have in common is that they call for collective action to develop new content or insights. In turn, this helps organizations to meet their own objectives.

Interestingly, they noted that there are five commonly agreed aspects which help define wisdom in concrete ways, namely:

1. Willingness to seek opportunities to resolve conflict
2. Willingness to search for compromise
3. Recognition of the limits of personal knowledge
4. Awareness that more than one perspective on a problem can exist
5. Appreciation of the fact that things may get worse they get better

Each of these qualities seems to be an essential building block for the kind of systemic thinking needed to address wide-scale societal challenges. As the synergies, trade-offs and connections within each sector and between various stakeholder groups become more complex, it seems like a logical way forward to embrace concepts such as resolving conflict, compromising, maintaining humility, listening to others’ perspectives and being prepared for the potential pitfalls and risks of doing so.

What are your views?

Highlighted in a blog post this week by Toby Webb from Ethical Corporation, the charts show that 95% of Nigerians, 87% of Bangladeshis, 77% of Pakistanis, 68% of Peruvians and 66% of Indians rank rising food price as their most pressing concern.

And interestingly, in a separate chart from the research, consumers’ trust in institutions reveals that they tend to trust scientists (52%) and NGOs (29%) most, with trust in global companies (-1%) and Government (2%) coming in lowest.

It would have also been interesting to see where media would have been placed in this second chart, and also to discuss further the role that media can and does play in translating the work and opinions of these institutions for their readers/viewers.

What are your thoughts?  And who do you think is doing the best job in addressing these concerns?

The report, Standards for Change?, argues that unlike the usual technical and systematic ISO sets of guidance tailored to achieve concrete and measurable results, ISO 26000 could be limited in that it offers no independent certification, which limits its appeal to companies, both public and private, and the ability to measure the hard impacts (quantifiable or measurable results) that come from adopting the standards.

Soft impacts such as attitude and cultural changes remain difficult to predict and monitor because of the early stages of ISO 260000, released only in 2010. Though, the IIED report was able to suggest the potential of both hard and soft impacts of the standards despite this.

Development of ISO 26000

ISO 26000 is unusual because it is the first time that ISO has devoted subject matter to social responsibility within organisations. The new standard set also uniquely links social responsibility directly with sustainable development, albeit the tangible implications of this are difficult to nail down. And, most importantly, the development of ISO 26000 expanded to include a wider range of stakeholders than usual.

Accordingly, what’s interesting about the development process of ISO 26000, according to IIED, is that it included representation from more developing countries than developed ones and directly addressed the interests of stakeholders instead of just shareholders.

The ISO 26000 content addresses the most prominent issues that fall under “sustainable development” such as environmental impacts, human rights, labour rights, stakeholder engagement and organisational governance. The new standards focus on guiding organisations only and are completely without policy recommendations.

Principles

ISO 26000 defines the following principles of social responsibility (intended to serve as fundamental considerations when addressing particular issues):

• accountability
• transparency
• ethical behaviour
• respect for stakeholder interests
• respect for the rule of law
• respect for international norms of behaviour
• respect for human rights

Potential Strengths

The worldwide esteem and recognition of ISO undoubtedly play a role in the standard’s success and implementation by global organisations.

The support of ISO’s members (162 National Standards Bodies) and the commitment of governments could help ensure that the new standard has widespread promotion, according to the IIED report:

“…the pattern of uptake for ISO 26000 is most likely to be led by countries in which there is a general national commitment to promoting the standard. In particular countries in which the government gives its explicit backing to ISO 26000 such as Argentina and China, there may be significant adoption rates.”

A key contribution of ISO 26000 will be to officially redefine and expand the definition of sustainable development for global organisations. Under ISO 26000, sustainable governance for organisations will include stakeholder interests as well as shareholder – making sustainability important not only for a company’s economic growth but for its overall recognition as a responsible steward in society. The emphasis on stakeholder empowerment separates ISO 26000 from previous standards.

Potential Weaknesses

According to the IIED report, ISO 26000 is “weakest on guidance for systemic and global-level approaches to sustainable development” for a few reasons:

1. It focuses on individual organisations, when system-level solutions could have been made.
2. The standard also doesn’t tie its emphasis on stakeholder empowerment to any formal mechanism or tactic, which consequently “dilutes its power.”
3. As an example the IIED report points out that systemic “clustering” of organisations in order to work together to improve on mutual issues around waste and energy was not captured or proposed as a solution in the environmental clause.

Ultimately, the adoption of the new standard by companies around the world will determine the potency of ISO 26000. It will be up to the organisation to choose the issues most relevant to them, but the ISO 26000 offers a potential for the current accepted horizons of CSR to be broadened.

First, here is a summary of the top key messages of the final conference statement from the State of the Planet report:

1. Research now shows that the continued ability of Earth to support the well-being of human civilisation is at risk.
2. In one lifetime, our interconnected and interdependent systems have come to place pressures on the environment and may cause fundamental changes in the Earth system and bring us beyond safe natural boundaries.
3. The defining challenge of our age is to safeguard Earth’s natural processes for the well-being of mankind.
4. Global sustainability must become a foundation of society. It is no longer sufficient to work towards a distant ideal of sustainability.
5. The Planet Under Pressure: New Knowledge Towards Solutions conference, convened by The Global Environmental Change Programmes and the International Council for Science, brought together nearly 3000 leading experts and decision-makers to discuss these challenges and offer solutions.

Andy Revkin summarised the conference’s closing notes in his Dot Earth Blog:

[The conference has ended] with a call for “urgent action” against the unrelenting build-up of greenhouse gases. But the prime focus, refreshingly, was on boosting science education and interdisciplinary inquiry and maintaining investments in systems and agencies devoted to comprehending environmental change.

Trends

A noted highlight was a talk on global trends by Sir John Beddington, a science advisor to the British government. Watch a short video summary of his practical approach to and perspective on four principle trends in the coming fifteen years: population growth, urbanisation, climate change and consumption patterns.

A Call for Practical Steps on Climate from Britain’s Science Adviser

Another session covered by SciDev.net was on whether developing countries should have a say about decisions around using extreme technical solutions, or, geoengineering to help mitigate or reverse climate change. It was agreed that decisions on geoengineering governance must involve developing countries, as conversations about the controversial discipline are currently “dominated by a small number of organisations in North America and Europe.”

The meeting also saw the release of an ambitious new report on how to tackle stresses on the global food system by the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, and is summarised by Justin Gillis on the New York Times Green Blog.

To read more about the sessions and outcome of the Planet Under Pressure Conference, visit the conference website, and follow the conference hashtag on Twitter #planet2012.

The report focuses on and explores the theme “Growth with Resilience” and makes a series of recommendations in three key areas: resilient people (social development), resilient markets (the rural economy) and resilient agriculture (food production).

Glasshouse was involved from initial planning through to the dissemination of the report, and joined panel members and senior officials at DFID for the report launch in London yesterday.

The report was conceived by the Montpellier Panel, a group of ten leading global experts in agriculture chaired by Sir Gordon Conway and sets out a new agricultural resilience strategy for African countries.

The report makes a set of recommendations for African agriculture and is a call to action to policy makers in advance of the G8, G20 and Rio+20 summits to realise synergies and invest in resilient agricultural growth in Africa.

So far, the report has received some good coverage from a number of media, including The Guardian, Reuters, BBC World Service Business Daily, The Huffington Post and Voice of America.

You can access the new report here.