Small Business Corporate Social Responsibility CSR and SDGs

Your vision is to give back to the community.

You want to give back to the community more, but also communicate this to your customers to show them your values aren't just something on paper.

You’re a large enough business now where you feel thankful for your opportunity to serve the business community. It’s not just a matter of thinking about how you could give back or what you could improve on; it’s actually doing these things, documenting the plan, communicating it to the community, and ensuring your employees are on board and following your lead. You have had lots of ideas, but realistically you can’t do everything at once, so you will need to initially prioritize what’s most impactful and most reasonable to get started with. Additionally, you would like to follow larger businesses you have seen lately and find a way to communicate this to your customers to be aware of your mission and values as a business.

If you could get this into a document of some sort, you not only have a tool to communicate to your customers, you are setting the plan for the business and building trust with your customers, which in turn ensures you are always considering the impact of your everyday activities, whether they be economic, environmental, or social. Getting it on paper makes it more likely to be top of mind and succeed, and provides a way to measure your impact. On a side note, if you have hopes to go public or take on investors at some point, stakeholders will likely be seeking reporting in this area.

The CSR and SDG case is a small office that runs a marketing software service with 25 employees.

They desire to contribute to society, but they are small, and they don’t have the footprint or capital to make large-scale changes. The things that they can do should be communicated to their customer base and community, but how are other businesses doing this? Is there something to follow?

One solution is to consider a policy for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and learn about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and how you can apply them to your own business.

What is CSR?

CSR (you may have heard this also called environmental social governance), is a business model that enables a business to be socially accountable to itself, its stakeholders, and the public through three pillars; environmental, social, and economic. This may sound formal and intimidating but think about the things you are already doing as a business regarding philanthropy and volunteer activities. In the case of the marketing software, socially, they volunteer time and money around the holidays to help at food banks. As for environmental, they could start a recycling program in the office and focus on emails and digital copies of resources to reduce waste and paper usage. They could start with aligning their business practices to promote long-term profitability for the economic pillar. CSR tends to focus on things the business has done, while SDGs are more about future goals. As a business, you will attract employees, customers, and possible investors if you are valuing social responsibility and commitment to improving the world.

What are SDGs?

SDGs are a list of 17 goals that focus on community involvement, human rights, consumers issues, labor practices, fair operating practices, and the environment. The entire list can be found here in further detail. These goals were established in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly with the intention of businesses around the world contributing and reaching them by 2030. Understanding how your business can adapt to encompass these goals is no simple task, but there are guides such as ISO20400 in this PDF as an example of assistance with sustainable procurement. This link is to an advanced search tool if you would like to check out other standards.

If you are a small business, though, as is the case example, you are unlikely to need to follow ISO. Instead, it’s recommended to start by looking at each of these in detail and think about how you can adapt your practices to expand your business’ contribution.

No poverty
Zero hunger
Good health and well-being
Quality education
Gender equality
Clean water and sanitation
Affordable and clean energy
Decent work and economic growth:
Industry, innovation, and infrastructure
Reduced inequalities
Sustainable cities and communities
Responsible consumption and production
Climate action
Life below water
Life on land
Peace, justice, and strong institutions
Partnerships for the goals

You may have heard documentation around this topic area referred to as non-financial reporting, triple bottom line reporting, or corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting. It’s no longer enough to just report on financials. Stakeholders, whether investors or customers are looking to know the businesses they support, can be trusted and are doing their part to protect the planet.

Examples of larger business CSR reports and their SDGs that may inspire you:

Company: Best Buy

Goals: These can be found on page 11, and they list 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13. Note that they state they aren’t part of the UN Global Compact, yet they incorporate the objectives into their community, people, and environment plans.

https://corporate.bestbuy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/FY18-full-report-FINAL.pdf

Company: Cisco

Goals: They list all of the goals but 14 and 17 and how they contribute to each.

https://www.cisco.com/c/m/en_us/about/csr/esg-hub/governance/unsdg.html

Company: Intuit

Goals: These can be found on page 6, and they list 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 13, 17 with clear to understand stats and goals by year.

https://www.intuit.com/content/dam/intuit/intuitcom/documents/company/intuit-cr-report-2020.pdf

Now that you’ve seen three examples let’s go back to the case of the marketing software business and focus on just 5 of these goals.

SDG 3 Good health and well-being: Invest in health as a priority by a small stipend for gym memberships or a walking club at lunch. Set a number to these, such as giving $300 annually, and we want to get at least 10 people to participate in the walking club this year.

SDG 4 Quality education: Take on two summer interns each year or even each semester to provide students with opportunities to learn the business world while in school. Consider a stipend for employee continuing education of $300 per year.

SDG 5 Gender equality: Ensure that benefits and equal job tasks are paid equally between genders. Determine which positions fall under this and set a goal of 100% equality by next year. For those that don’t fall under equal tasks and are unique positions, make sure you are paying the market rate for the level of experience and not using gender or other related factors to determine pay.

SDG 8 Decent work and economic growth: Establish a policy and stick with no unfair hiring practices. Consider donating the software to mentor young people, women, or minority entrepreneurs. Set a goal for the upcoming year of 20 entrepreneurs.

SDG 10 Reduced inequalities: Develop a living wage policy. Set your minimum pay by x% over minimum wage this year, and have a goal to increase that each year after if needed until it's reasonable.

These were fairly quick to come up with and relatively low cost for a small business, and if adopted, this business is on their to CSR.

Think about how you could take just one of the SDGs and implement different practices in your business and comment your thoughts!

Written by Nicole Hullihen, July 17th, 2021.

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References recommended if you want to learn more about CSR and SDGs.

ARCO LAB. (2020, Jun 1). Why sustainability reporting is important for private and public organizations. ARCO. Retrieved from https://www.arcolab.org/en/sustainability-reporting-important-for-businesses/.

Edwards, C. (2018, Aug 7). UN’s Sustainable Development Goals for Small Businesses. Business.com. Retrieved from https://www.business.com/articles/un-sustainable-development-goals-for-small-business/.

Fernando, J. (2021, Feb 2). Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Investopedia. Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corp-social-responsibility.asp.

GRI. (n.d.). How to use the GRI Standards. GRI. Retrieved from https://www.globalreporting.org/how-to-use-the-gri-standards/.

ISO. (n.d.). ISO 26000 Social Responsibility. ISO. Retrieved from https://www.iso.org/iso-26000-social-responsibility.html.

ISO. (n.d.). How ISO Standards help meet the SDGs. ISO. Retrieved from https://www.iso.org/sdgs.html.

United Nations. (n.d.). The 17 Goals. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Retrieved from https://sdgs.un.org/goals.