Kim Leslie’s PR Blog

The Brita Products Company exercises CSR in many areas, including its eco-conscious partnership with Nalgene to reduce bottled water waste. The partnership, called Filter For Good, urges consumers to fill reusable Nalgene water bottles with water filtered through Brita filters. The companies ask consumers to make a pledge to use reusable water bottles at least a few days a week to reduce the number of water bottles in landfills.

Brita’s CSR aligns with its “About Us” section on the company’s website. Brita “prides itself in being a good corporate citizen,” and uses the Filter For Good campaign and others like it to demonstrate that their company cares about the environment. Of course, these are PR tactics used to implement CSR, but this is where CSR begins for Brita, not where it ends. The Filter For Good campaign goes beyond the company’s statement that it cares about the environment. Filter For Good empowers consumers to adopt eco-friendly habits, instead of simply telling consumers how the company helps the environment. For example, Filter For Good partnered with the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and eliminated the need for the 50,000 disposable water bottles the Festival gave to attendees in 2008. Attendees were given complimentary Nalgene bottles and filled them with filtered Brita water located throughout the Festival. Not only did this reduce waste at the Festival, it encouraged consumers to continue to reduce bottled water waste in the future.

Brita’s CSR strengthens relationships with key stakeholders such as consumers, employees, and shareholders. Filter For Good helps to ensure that key stakeholders feel that their contributions (monetary or otherwise) to the company are making an impact in the world and making a difference. In addition, the Filter For Good partnership with the Sundance Film Festival exhibits Brita’s desire to place environmental issues and interests before its own self-interests. This is exemplified by the free filtered water Brita provided and the free water bottles provided by Nalgene. Donating their products in this way for environmental interests impacted consumers. Through the Filter For Good CSR campaign, Brita has demonstrated that others truly benefit from the company’s existence (the point of CSR).

Corporate social responsibility, or CSR, has become an increasingly popular topic for PR professionals and PR firms. Despite CSR’s rising popularity, PR practitioners must proceed with caution when implementing CSR. PR firms and practitioners must ensure that their own companies and values meet the ethical standards of CSR. If PR firms and practitioners are not practicing CSR along with values-driven PR, then how can they expect to be credible sources in CSR implementation for other companies? PR practitioners must take on the role of practicing CSR themselves before they can counsel companies on corporate ethics.  They must go beyond teaching others about CSR and work to implement and advocate for ethical business practices for themselves and other PR practitioners and firms.

PR practitioners must also remember that their role in CSR is not to use it as a tool, but to use PR as a tool for CSR implementation. Unfortunately, many continue to view PR as just image building and publicity. Due to this, CSR must not become a tool used for publicity as part of a PR program for a company. Instead, CSR must stand apart from PR and become something that is embedded in a company’s core focus and values.

In addition, CSR cannot be used simply as PR to strengthen relationships with key stakeholders. As a result of a company proving through CSR that it seeks to promote and achieve more than its own self-interests, CSR should strengthen relationships with key stakeholders. Moreover, effective PR for a company should be a product of CSR implementation.

PR and CSR both target stakeholders such as employees, shareholders, and customers. Once a company has implemented CSR into its core values and mission, the company can use PR to inform key stakeholders of this. CSR means putting social and other global issues before a company’s self-interest. Thus, CSR implementation should begin before PR about CSR. Otherwise, companies and practitioners are missing the point of CSR: others should benefit from the existence of a company.

Many PR practitioners could learn a lot from implementing CSR themselves (and gain some credibility too).