CSR India – Six Criterias For Selecting A Consultant

As business embeds to the corporate social responsibility into their firms, the value of working with CSR consultants hasn’t been very clear to many. Although, there are dozens, perhaps even more, of ways that companies have improved their corporate structure working with CSR consultants.  Indeed, we’ve written about lots of them in our blog.

In this blog, I’ve explored some of the impressive information surrounding the CSR consulting and the difference of CSR with corporate sustainability.

The corporate social responsibility consultants help any size company integrate the CSR concepts into their business model to shape sustainable corporate self-regulation. But in many cases, companies will hire a consultant and inversely to the situation, they need not hire a consultant. For e.g. if you understand your company’s social purpose, then your communications team executives should be able to get the message out. Or if you have made CSR an HR priority, then you shouldn’t need outside help to increase employee engagement or establish a volunteer program. 

Although, there are some exceptions in the specific areas such as social audits of supply chains, environmental impact assessments and measurements of social outcomes where a third party assurance is necessary. But the overall objective is to build an inner CSR capacity wherever it is required and possible. 

As the research stats reveal, as the demand for corporate social responsibility is decreasing, the supply is increasing. Here, Google search for Corporate social responsibility consultants revealed more than 5,000 results in New York City, 1,650 results in Mumbai city, 4,100 results in Lonon. There’s now so much at stake and providing a choice to corporations that are new to CSR or need to improve their programs have a hard time selecting the right CSR advisor.

In the corporate culture, sustainability is frequently set to confuse CSR, though this concept of corporate social responsibility is traced from a longer period than corporate sustainability. There are differences between them, but most important; CSR is a backward-looking, and for instance considering CSR project evaluating – it evaluates the performance of earlier periods and reports them about the initiatives taken to minimize the negative effects in business, whereas the Corporate sustainability is forward. It plans to secure the future by reserving the resources.

Six criteria that particularly important:

Further this post to be more helpful, I created a checklist for corporations to use when they need to find a CSR consultant. The six criteria that I think are particularly important:

• The breadth of experience: Having queries is common for an individual like, ‘did it work in different business categories?’ ‘Have they worked for different corporations & as well as non-profit organizations?’ ‘Did they work in the small and large firm business?’ etc… There is always a cross-learning that comes applying CSR in a wide range of situations.

• Depth of experience:  Many people are passionate about CSR and have already started consulting in this area. When selecting a corporate socialite consultant, you need to balance zeal with experience.

• Diversity: Work with the CSR consultant, who reflects both the external and internal audience you need to reach and influence. This means a corporate socialite should have access to a wide range of opinions and people of different ages, genders, etc.

• Building capacity: As described, most CSR aspects need to be handled internally, avoid consultants who’re excessive self-promoters. The best consultants place a high priority on putting themselves out of the workbox.

• Social Change: Academic credentials and practical experiences for business is never enough. Corporate social responsibility is a bridge for the gap between profit and purpose. This nurtures, the consultants need to know how social change works and change in the first place.

• Inspiration: Have or find a consultant who inspires to be proactively positive and appropriate.

I’m often asked about who’s doing remarkable work in this area. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of individuals and organizations who are working in CSR and it’s out of the question to keep up with who’s doing what.