New Zealand Celsias

Companies trying to get the word out about their corporate social responsibility credentials shouldn't underestimate the value of crowdsourcing and social media. That seems to be the advice from recent research released by Weber Shandwick’s social impact specialty group. The research, conducted by KRC Research for the public relation firm in October last year, involved surveying over 200 corporate executives from Fortune 200 companies with responsibility for philanthropic, social responsibility or community relations. 

According to that research, 44 percent of companies have used crowdsourcing to ask customers to provide ideas and help in decision-making on how to tackle issues and achieve goals. And a massive 95 percent of executives who used the crowdsourcing option said it was a valuable tool for an orgainsaitons CSR efforts.  

When asked why crowdsourcing is valuable for CSR programs, 36 percent of respondents said it highlights new perspectives and diverse options; 25 percent said it helps build engagement and relationships with key audiences; 22 percent said it invites clients and customers from nontraditional sources to contribute ideas and opinions; and 16 percent said it helps brings new energy into the process of generating ideas and content. 

And even those executives who had not yet tried crowdsourcing seemed confident about it, with 43 percent saying it could be valuable to their organisation’s future efforts.

And what of the social media role? 72 percent of executives surveyed said social media had been used to communicate about their CSR efforts, meanwhile 59 percent say it had a positive impact on the quality of their communications with consumers. Meanwhile 68 percent agree that social media is an effective way of driving engagement with consumers and clients.

The main motivation to use social media, at 38 percent, is that it helps enable companies to reach broad and diverse audiences. 29 percent valued it for its ability to connect companies directly with consumers by low-cost and efficient means, and 11 percent said it helps companies engage specific constituencies more easily.

So who among the social media platform ruled the survey? You probably won’t be surprised to find out it was Facebook. At 67 percent, Facebook was named as the most valuable social tool for companies to engage with consumers and clients. This was followed by blogs (60 percent), LinkedIn (58 percent), twitter (46 percent). Location-based services like FourSquare came in with 44 percent.

The full survey results are available HERE and you can also see the results in the video link below.

The survey has a margin of error of +/-6.8 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.