COM 221: 'Keys to the store'

In class today (Friday) I "gave away the keys to the store," by asking students to get in the Google search engine, search on keywords "community relations," look at the corporate websites in the directory (IBM, the U.S. Justice Department and The Palm Beach Post among others), choose one and post to the message board their answers to two questions:

1. How does your organization do community relations?
2. Why does your organization do community relations?

In this assignment, I was especially interested in how their community relations statements relate to their corporate mission statement, vision, strategic planning and other indicators of corporate values.

Here's why.

As we studied the chapter on community relations in our textbook, and especially as we visited the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship website in class Wednesday, I noticed some of our key concepts in the course coming together. For example, the BCCCC's discussion "What is Corporate Citizenship?" struck me as an excellent statement of core ethical principles:

Minimize harm: Work to minimize the negative consequences of business activities and decisions on stakeholders, including employees, customers, communities, ecosystems, shareholders, and suppliers. Examples include operating ethically, supporting efforts to stop corruption, championing human rights, preventing environmental harm, enforcing good conduct from suppliers, treating employees responsibly, ensuring the safety of employees, ensuring that marketing statements are accurate, and delivering safe, high-quality products.

Maximize benefit: Contribute to societal and economic well-being by investing resources in activities that benefit shareholders as well as broader stakeholders. Examples include participating voluntarily to help solve social problems (such as education, health, youth development, economic development for low-income communities, and workforce development), ensuring stable employment, paying fair wages, and producing a product with social value.

Be accountable and responsive to key stakeholders: Build relationships of trust that involve becoming more transparent and open about the progress and setbacks businesses experience in an effort to operate ethically. Create mechanisms to include the voice of stakeholders in governance, produce social reports assured by third parties, operate according to a code of conduct, and listen to and communicate with stakeholders.

Support strong financial results: The responsibility of a company to return a profit to shareholders must always be considered as part of its obligation to society.

Two other links from the BCCCC menu on Corporate Citizenship (third from the left among the pull-down menus at top of the page) that tell a lot about the concept are "The Value Proposition," which is kind of theoretical but very informative, and the "State of Corporate Citizenship," which gives results of a survey of businesses that summarizes evidence of how it is practiced in the real world.

In chapters 5-8 of our textbook, we learned howto do public relations. In this website, we learn why. Both will be on the final exam.