Five years later, since the mandate of the 2% Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) spending per company, We notice that the concept of CSR (or social investment) has not reached the level of maturity needed for the market to progress further. Despite the push in laws and regulatory intervention the term CSR is still widely interpreted across the region, with a general lack of standardization of frameworks and reporting metrics.
Over the last two years, Sustainable Square India has worked closely with organizations such as Ambuja Cement Foundation, Godrej, and Cognizant Technologies as their Knowledge partner to filling the gaps in the market between corporate sustainability and responsible social investment. This year we were officially selected as the knowledge partner of PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Delhi and Bombay Chamber of Commerce.
In these two years we have identified some gaps in the market and have worked with companies to overcome them, here is how we did it:
- Understanding, Collecting and Presenting Data.
The region does not underestimate the importance of data, with so many players in the market who solely focuses on data collection and gathering. However, one of the gaps that we have noticed within the market is that when organizations want to validate and evidence their social impacts and sustainability efforts, they do this by employing a standardized checklist of questions without genuinely understanding if it is applicable or relevant to them. Most of the time wrong or not enough information is 1) beginning collected and 2) presented incorrectly.
One of the highlights we have experienced is working with organizations to get them to understand the story behind their social spending. Getting companies to ask the correct questions that showcase the impact created through an evidenced-based methodology and then realizing the best ways and channels to use and reuse this data.
- The innovation of practices, strategies, and frameworks.
Over the last five years, there has been an increase in the number of international guidelines and frameworks being adopted either as reporting standards to adhere by, or assessment criteria. This trend has seen the market shift towards creating more localized, relevant metrics; however the progress is slow due to the lack of knowledge and awareness around the subject. Companies are failing to recognize how these international guidelines and frameworks shouldn’t be used as a box-ticking exercise, but a more holistic method of understanding how context can play an essential role in the social and sustainability journey of an organization.
We have seen a few cases of organizations working with international frameworks trying to assess the impact and did not cater to the local realities causing the entire study to be redundant. While everyone is trying to be the one-stop-shop player within the region, we have found it much easier to work with organizations in a transparent and authentic manner to take these international frameworks and innovate them to solve complex problems, building the capacity for organizations we work to become the leaders of their sectors in social and sustainability innovation.
A recent success of ours is our newly launched portfolio assessment service, which enables us to work with organizations to assess the strength and impact of their entire CSR portfolio rather than just a stand-alone project amongst other benefits. Portfolio assessment was born out of the industry need of understanding how an organizations community investments were doing.
Although there are more gaps within the region, we have decided to highlight these two. The progress of sustainability and CSR (social investment) practices with the market will rely on an organization’s ability to ask the correct set of questions to correct the right data and innovate as much as possible to customize approached to their local and industry needs.
As the world moves towards impact investing, sustainable indices and purpose-driven responsible business, companies can no longer afford to take the shortcut in their practices data, as it could mean losing foreign investments, customers, employees or brand reputation.
