🌟 Toast to Transparency: Measuring and Sharing Impact with your CSR Initiatives 🥂

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The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) world can be seen as a good-intended person carefully walking on a tightrope. CSR activities have to be balanced in management and delivery, captured in effective and impactful documentation.

We share our experience to help you gain insight into the fine balance of measuring and sharing your company’s impact.

Regardless of all the different customer personas, the growth of consumer awareness is now overarching all messages and initiatives. Customers demand an increase in transparency on values such as sustainability, climate change, and human ethics within any given company. This has led to an impact on how different industries are making, marketing, and selling their products. 

 

Bringing Transparency to CSR

Today’s Conscious Customer is spoilt with choice. They have the ability to choose products by brands that align with their VALUES, and brands they TRUST. The past marketing visuals of popular celebrity faces, dew-dropped products, and exotic locations with attractive women are just not cutting it anymore. 

Now, we’re not saying to ditch the cool cars in your ads, but further communication of your company’s principles and active impact is equally as important. 

We believe trust comes from transparency. This truthful capturing and communication of your impact is a story waiting to be documented. 

Documenting your CSR 

Did you know that how you document your CSR Initiative makes a difference in the way that it is received by the customer? In a 2022 study (linked here), it was shown consumers were conscious of the source of CSR communications; whether it was company-controlled vs third party-controlled. 

Consumers were reported as having a higher level of trust in a third party than in the company itself. In addition, there had to be a congruence between the external messaging advertised versus internal practices at play. 

 

A documentary partner here can function as a critical tool in generating this authentic story. From our experiences at In the Mirror Films, functioning as a third party allowed employees, participants, and benefactors of the CSR initiatives to share in a way that deviated from the script but was spoken from the heart. 

With fresh pairs of eyes (and squeaky clean camera lenses), our external vantage point allows an accurate capture and reflection of your initiative. And this makes sense – marketing of a CSR requires a fine balance between honoring and celebrating the company’s impacts without excessive praise and self-shoulder patting. It’s all about transparency and truth. We can help bring that to you.

 

Sharing and Measuring

Often overlooked, the first element of sharing CSR initiatives starts internally. Did you know that “CSR is only effective when stakeholders are aware of a company’s CSR efforts?” [1]. This highlights that all CSR practices must be accompanied by CSR communication, especially internal communication.

Questions to help measure your initiative include;

  1. Are your company’s employees aware of, practicing, and endorsing the initiatives? 
  2. Are the stakeholders engaged? [2]

 

Turning outwards… whilst CSR initiatives are not done for merely public perception (we hope), we definitely feel that impactful initiatives deserve exposure and recognition. CSR initiatives should be a key messaging pillar in customer contact as this impacts the company’s overall reputation and factors into their purchasing decision. 

  1. Has there been a change in brand perception and reputation score? 
  2. Has there been a change in purchasing since the campaign? 

 

The increase in communicative channels allows a more open diffusion of information to the public, most notably through social media. With short-form video format functioning as key consumer content (aka, TikToks and Instagram Reels), video documentation is more important than ever. 

In addition, social media allows smaller, more digestible chunks of information as and when the customer demands it. With the availability of statistics within social media platforms, measurement can more easily be gauged; 

  1. What do the social media’s ‘engagement’ stats reflect towards your CSR initiative? 
  2. What is the ‘responsiveness’ of the public towards the campaign? 

 

 

At In the Mirror Films, we tell YOUR stories and help you design the best videos possible to reflect your values, your key messages, and your opinions. 

If any of the above resonated with you, please do get in touch on;

https://www.inthemirrorfilms.com/#lbit

clement@inthemirrorfilms.com

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