The Social Impact Of Corporate Community Involvement Programs
A Centre for Social Impact study asks: Why do companies ignore measuring the social impact of their Corporate Community Involvement programs?
Last updated by Admin, October 21, 2009
Date: 21 October 2009
Denni Arli and Gianni Zappala writing for the Centre for Social Impact investigate the reasons why corporations are generally unwilling to measure the social impacts that their Community Involvement (CI) programs may be having. According to the authors, the three main reasons corporations give are:
- A lack of time and resources within companies to measure the social impact of the community-based projects they support;
- It seems that companies are basically not interested in measuring the social impact of the community-based projects they support;
- The current standardised frameworks and measures around CR performance and reporting do not generally focus on or encourage measuring social impact.
The paper then goes on to explore the concept of Social Return on Investment as a framework that could easily be adopted by corporations which would enable them to measure the impacts of their CI programs.
The full briefing paper can be downloaded here (pdf)