Advice from experts at BP, BSR, McDonald’s, Sun Microsystems and Xerox.

By Garrett Glaser

With a record number of companies around the world annually increasing staff and expenditures to publicize their corporate social responsibility (CSR) credentials, the time seemed right to survey some of the most experienced practitioners in the field about how they promote CSR achievements. The goal: to learn their dos and don’ts, the musts and must-avoids. Here’s a summary of what we found.

1. Don’t Stretch The Truth

The one question that elicited nearly identical answers was: “What should a company never do when promoting its CSR accomplishments?” The message was loud and clear: “Don’t exaggerate.”

Bob Langert, Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility for McDonald’s: “There’s no place for fluff or exaggerated claims. CSR success depends upon tangible results, not rhetoric.”

David Douglas, Vice President of Eco Responsibility at Sun Microsystems: “A big mistake is to send the message that your company believes it has done all it can do. There is always room for improvement when it comes to developing business practices that create social and business value. To indicate otherwise brings the credibility of your company’s entire CSR program into question.”

Mary Jane Klocke, Director of North American Shareholder Marketing, BP: “Neither exaggerate the positive nor downplay the negative. Transparency and clear communication of the facts, along with the context, help to build trust and credibility with your stakeholders.”

Aron Cramer, President and CEO, Business for Social Responsibility (BSR): “Companies are never effective when they overstate the impact of their successes.”

2. Be Transparent

BSR’s Cramer: “Companies [succeed when they] acknowledge the complexity of the issues they’re addressing and acknowledge their own imperfections.”

Sun Microsystems’ Douglas: “Trans­parency is almost as important as the results themselves...being transparent about how we achieved our success—and our setbacks—enables Sun’s
continuous improvement...”

McDonald’s Langert: “In order to have credibility, you need to focus on communicating results, performance and what more needs to be done.”

3. Use Third-Party Verification

A number of the respondents regarded outside monitoring of a company’s claims as crucial to their acceptance.

McDonald’s Langert: “Make sure you can back up your CSR efforts with facts and substance; ideally have a third-party partner support your efforts...and be open about the process, results and imperfections, as well.”

BSR’s Cramer: “Companies are always more credible when a neutral third-party has the chance to assess the success—and offer an independent, well-informed opinion about the significance of the action taken.”

4. Remember the Workers

Another lesson cited repeatedly was the importance of including employees when telling the story, instead of focusing overwhelmingly on external stakeholders.

Hector Motroni, Chief Ethics Officer, Xerox: “We’ve been amazed by the volume of positive, thoughtful comments from Xerox people worldwide after we released our first comprehensive global citizenships report last year... We’ve learned that not being shy about telling our CSR stories resonates incredibly well with employees. They’re the ones who drive these great accomplishments. There is tremendous power in ensuring that your people know you’re a company with a heart and soul that stands for ‘something more.’”

5. Explain Your Metrics

With measurement systems for CSR progress increasingly discussed and debated, take the time to explain to stakeholders exactly how you took the measurements.

Sun Microsystems’ Douglas: “Make sure you talk about how you measured your results... We are careful to build metrics into our social and eco-responsibility programs so that we can track our progress...and so that our stakeholders can hold us accountable. Without metrics, and transparency around our choice of metrics, we would not be able to continue to engage our stakeholders to work with us.”

6. Be Proactive

As the person in charge of telling BP’s story to U.S. investors, Mary Jane Klocke stressed the need to reach out in multiple ways when communicating.

BP’s Klocke: “The single greatest lesson I’ve learned...is the importance of being proactive in building relationships with our stakeholder base. BP is a huge company with more than 100 business units in 100 countries. We often set up meetings with management or hold seminars on BP’s major production projects in developing countries. We schedule conference calls on issues of concern. Engagement raises brand awareness, offers valuable insights and perspectives from key stakeholders and gives us avenues of influence and opportunity to get the facts out...rather than have the [socially responsible investment or SRI] community receive its information from the media or other third parties.”

Disarmingly straightforward, comments from the experts seem grounded in simple common sense. Yet to regard the advice itself as “simple” would be a mistake. Yes, it’s true that the hurdles marketers face in publicizing CSR successes—credibility, measurability, distribution, to name a few—are the same as ever, but it’s also true that something new is afoot that is making the job more difficult: the sophistication and skepticism of stakeholders on the receiving end of the story. In a field fraught with complexity, that’s about as clear a development as you can get.

Garrett Glaser is Vice President, Corporate Communications, at Interpublic unit MWW Group and a former reporter for “CNBC Business News.” He can be reached at gglaser@mww.com.