This quote from a young Haitian man featured in an Associated Press article headline describes his and his country’s dependence on tourists to meet their basic survival needs. Those needs have existed for years, but were profoundly exacerbated when the 7.0-magnitude earthquake befell his country last month.

Certainly, life is fragile. As Abraham Maslow introduced with his Hierarchy of Needs, the most basic level of human existence is based on meeting needs necessary for survival. This includes the need for water, air, food and sleep. Many Haitians never took those needs for granted and since the earthquake hit, those needs have been severely magnified.

Three days after the earthquake, one of the largest foreign investors in Haiti, Royal Caribbean Cruises, detailed its plans to help. With a solid corporate social responsibility framework already in place, the global cruise line launched its relief program and announced a minimum of $1 million in humanitarian aid. The company coordinated with its existing charitable partners Food for the Poor, Pan American Development Foundation, in addition to its own Haitian foundation, the Solano Foundation.

Royal Caribbean laid out its plans to continue cruise ship calls to its private beach in Labadee, Haiti, complete with deliveries of food, water and other necessary provisions on each stop. The brand outlined how it would support its Haitian employees and their families, and how its cruise guests could contribute to the cause. On top of all that, a Haitian United Nations representative endorsed Royal Caribbean’s plans and fully supported the continuation of cruise ship calls, highlighting their positive economic benefits for the country.

Royal Caribbean covered its bases, activated existing crisis protocols, engaged with its charity partners and committed significant financial support to the cause. The brand put its commitment to Haiti into action.

But more proactive stakeholder engagement and education was needed. Even with all the efforts to do the right thing, the cruise line’s reputation came under fire when people learned calls to Labadee would continue. As in any highly-emotional situation, critics jumped to conclusions because they simply didn’t have the proper context, they didn’t know the whole story.

Mainstream news organizations reported the information, which elicited a very negative response with many comments on mainstream online news outlets. Bloggers and advocacy groups criticized the company. Pictures were painted of tourists lounging on the private beach sipping pina coladas and jet skiing while just 60 miles away people suffered in Port-au-Prince.

This tragic situation reinforces the important role a sensitive, responsible and quick 360-degree stakeholder engagement strategy is to sustaining corporate reputation, especially in highly-emotional scenarios. It’s a reminder that even when great measures are taken to do the right thing, unfortunately doing the right thing often isn’t enough to protect reputation.

Not only do crisis protocols need to be in place, polished and ready to activate at any minute, an organization’s plan must include immediate steps to inform all of its important stakeholder groups of what it’s doing and why it’s doing it to mitigate any misinformation or ill-informed opinions that may be formed simply due to lack of awareness.

There are those who saw the bigger picture and defended the brand. They pointed to the very important role Royal Caribbean and its competitors actually play in facilitating the kind of sustainable tourism that will help a developing nation like Haiti not only recover from this tragedy, but actually grow stronger for the future.

Arthur Applbaum, a Harvard professor of ethics, told the Associated Press that while it shows … “moral sensitivity to be disturbed by the thought that one is vacationing on the beach when others are suffering nearby … it also shows insufficient moral reflection to think that proximity makes a moral difference. The people of Haiti are suffering whether you take your beach vacation in the Dominican Republic or in Hawaii,” he said, “and it is a failure of the moral imagination not to be equally troubled in Waikiki.”

In emotionally-charged situations, brands must take into account the big picture, while remaining exceptionally sensitive to extreme tragedy. The young Haitian man’s quote, “Without this, we don’t eat,” puts everything into perspective. This is the point around which Royal Caribbean’s decision to continue responsible Labadee port calls with a heavy emphasis on aid to Haiti must be based upon. It is the most basic level of human need and is a huge opportunity for the brand not only to deliver aid in this time of tragedy, but also to take the lead role in building a stronger future for Haiti and its people.

Matt Averitt can be reached at maveritt@mww.com

maveritt Crisis Communications, CSR Crisis Communication, CSR, Haiti

One of the trends of 2009 that is sure to continue in 2010 is the emphasis on Corporate Social Responsibility as a critical element of success for organizations of all sizes. And while history has shown the tendency to seek a silver bullet – CSR = philanthropy, or more recently, CSR = “GREEN” (a topic for an entirely different post, I think) I am pleased to see more companies and more clients taking a substantive approach to CSR that is comprehensive, authentic and pardon the already over-used word, SUSTAINABLE.

People are taking notice of citizenship, on Main Street and in the media — Target’s commitment to education and its communities (full disclosure – an MWW Group client), Starbuck’s Shared Planet and Best Buy’s eco-responsibility platform come to mind. Recently, Chipotle’s support of the “real food” and “slow food” movements was enough to score them the holy grail of PR – an Oprah endorsement.

All great issues. All authentic to the brand and the business. Makes you feel good about spending your hard earned dollars there, doesn’t it? That’s the idea.

That’s why I am so disappointed that so few of the leaders in CSR talk about CSR as it related to workplace, culture and employees. Clearly, some of them are thinking about it, and even building their programs with employee input. A Fortune magazine article about Best Buy tells me that their entire platform was created because it was meaningful to employees – long before it was meaningful to customers. But it is more than that…

Citizenship and responsibility begin at home. You can’t be a good corporate citizen – no matter how well you treat the planet or support the arts – if you haven’t created a culture of citizenship within your organization….responsibility to and for your employees is key to the sustainability and authenticity of your “Citizenship Story” – and the ability to sustain communities is rooted first and foremost in the creation of good jobs for its residents. And in this era of high unemployment and mistrust, I thought I had found someone who “GETS IT” when I started reading about the Coca Cola Live Positively platform….defined as living positively for their people, their products and their planet. BINGO.

Except that PEOPLE is defined as the customers who buy and drink Coca Cola products…not the people who make them, sell them, deliver them or discover them. What a missed opportunity – to make this platform meaningful to the employees, who go to work every day in the face of public outcries against soda in schools and the big bad soda companies. And what a missed opportunity to engage and activate those employees to demonstrate and communicate the values of Coca Cola in their interactions with their colleagues, business relationships and in their communities.

If you want to be a “good citizen” what could be more important that your interaction with employees, and your inclusion of them in your external CSR story.

Citizenship isn’t just about the big external programs – it is about the careers you create, and the opportunity for people to sustain their own lives. It is about a reputation earned through the word of mouth in the community – which often begins with the words of your employees. Citizenship begins at home. Or it can’t be sustained for long.

Carreen Winters can be reached at cwinters@mww.com.

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Yesterday marked the opening of one of the most historic conferences in modern history – COP-15, the Copenhagen Climate Change Convention.  One hundred and ninety-two nations are in attendance – the largest total of nations ever attending any meeting in the world.  And it looks increasingly likely – what with President Obama’s schedule change to allow him to attend during the final negotiations, and top leadership from China and India promising to be there – that a global agreement on limiting carbon will emerge.

Norway’s Environment Minister had a particularly trenchant quote this morning:  The negotiations at COP-15, he said, “are the most difficult talks ever embarked upon by humanity.”   Whoa.

If the talks fail and no agreement emerges, the problem won’t go away, however – it will just make the delay in dealing with worldwide CO2 emissions and the actions needed to reduce them more painful in the long term.  The inevitable conclusion?  Climate change is real – the science is pretty unanimous at this point — and global efforts to mitigate the problem will eventually be implemented.

So this juncture in the world’s history, like most big watershed moments, will undoubtedly have a particularly powerful impact on the reputations of organizations all over the planet.

That’s why we are urging our clients, green and light green and any other color, to put their reputational stake in the ground around climate.  It is the one overarching litmus test of environmental responsibility, because it encompasses every green topic and subject.  Climate change is the first truly global environmental crisis humanity has had to deal with collectively, which means that companies and NGOs who are first to the conversation will reap the reputational rewards in the minds of their publics.  And since young people the world over increasingly self-identify as environmentally-minded, CSR and green programs have become mandatory for future-minded organizations,

Just a few examples:  The centerpiece of COP-15, in the middle of the lake in front of the Tycho Brahe Observatory in the center of Copenhagen, is a remarkable debut art installation called Carbon Cubes.  Designed to show us all, for the first time, what the volume of a metric ton of invisible carbon looks like, the Cube is 27 feet on each side, about the size of a three-story house.  The Cube represents what each person in the Western world emits: a ton of carbon every 2-3 weeks.  Google and YouTube, along with Millennium Arts and a host of other organizations including the United Nations and MWW, have supported the building of the Cube, with the goal of touring it around the world to illustrate the magnitude of the problem – and to represent, in real-time video projected on the Cube – some of the solutions.  This massive symbol of all of our human contributions to climate change makes such a tremendous impact because it’s a stark representation of the task in front of all of us.

Another remarkable exhibit is blooming in Copenhagen, too — Ghost Forest is a huge, haunting installation by artist Angela Palmer that raises public awareness of the connections between deforestation and climate change.  Originally exhibited in Trafalgar Square in London and underwritten by Deutsche Bank, the installation features ten massive rainforest tree stumps taken from a regulated, commercially logged tropical rainforest in Ghana.  These huge stumps, arranged in a circle and looking like the felled giants they truly are, have a potent presence.  Once alive and creating oxygen for the entire world to breathe, they now lie mutely and even accusingly on their sides, the true expression of the term deadwood.

When you see the Carbon Cube or the Ghost Forest at COP-15 or in another venue eventually, you will not forget them – they are both remarkably potent symbols of climate change and what our world is doing, or not doing, about it.  And of course you and everyone else who sees them will indelibly remember the forward-looking, smart sponsors of these exhibits, too.

David Langness can be reached at dlangness@mww.com.

dlangness CSR, Sustainability CSR, Sustainability

It’s a common refrain now for reputation managers to say that good corporate responsibility programs need to be authentic, not an egregiously overt marketing play, and make Good Business Sense. This is the stuff – when smartly communicated – of strong and enduring reputations.

Further than that, good CR demands a holistic view of the community – local, national, or global – in which a company operates.

So it’s nice when a company proves that notion. A story in Fortune about Best Buy, written by respected corporate citizenship and sustainability reporter Marc Gunther, explores how the retailer is turning itself into a leader in corporate responsibility. Not just because it’s a feel-good activity, but because it makes strategic sense.

Two salient passages from the story simply explain Best Buy’s push into sustainability and CR:

• “Employees wanted to know what Best Buy was doing to become more environmentally sustainable. Some customers — not most, but enough to matter — said they preferred to do business with retailers that cared about their community.”

• “Best Buy, as a result, has decided that being a good corporate citizen makes business sense.”

The article goes on to detail all that Best Buy is doing – making investments in responsible companies, organizing employee networks for growth and opportunity, offering electronic take-backs in stores and auditing foreign factories for carbon emission and fair labor practices. They are considering all audiences, internal and external.

What seems, as written, to be such strong commitment makes me think a little about the evolution of corporate responsibility. With CR, the business imperative seems to be evolving not so much incrementally but in big waves.

Allow an abridged and unscientific history:

For a while, “strategic philanthropy” was the totality of social commitment. Companies should simply write checks to charities and that is enough. Plus, giving out those oversized novelty checks made for good photo opps (and still do).

But in the early part of this decade, there was an overwhelming push to “be green.” Any claim about being green, no matter how specious, was endorsed by an excited media happy to cover a new business trend, only creating more companies that wanted to bask in glowing media attention.

Then, the inevitable backlash. The media began demanding proof that the claims were more than hollow marketing brochures (some of which were likely not even printed on recycled paper) designed to dupe the consumer. “Greenwashing” was the battle cry and companies were exposed left and right for distorting the truth.

But that greenwashing hunt seems to be dying down. Companies – some, not all – got smarter about what they should and should not claim, and are realizing there is pressure to be more than “green” though environmental responsibility is still a critical part of the mix.

Companies that want to be better citizens – now existing in an era of extreme suspicion in the wake of stunning scandals and staggering greed – are focusing on fair labor practices, commitment to employees, increased support in local communities, and more transparency with consumers and other stakeholders.

There are those that say it isn’t up to corporations to solve societal problems; that by focusing on simply making money and creating jobs they are fulfilling their responsibility. And to an extent I agree. But that mindset doesn’t build a sterling reputation or earn the trust of the public.

Mike Sacks can be reached at msacks@mww.com.

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