Consultancies advising companies on their strategic direction have
commanded the highest number of searches by visitors to a new online
directory of CSR service providers.
In the first six weeks of
the online version of the Ethical Performance CSR Professional Services
Directory, the largest number of searches (177) was made for providers
of corporate strategy advice, making this comfortably the most popular
of the 49 categories available. The next most frequent search was for
sustainability specialists (154), followed by consultancies with
climate change expertise (153).
More surprisingly, there were
113 searches for CSR information technology specialists, making that
category search the seventh most popular. Philippe Tesler, co-founder
of Enablon, a provider of software for managing corporate social and
environmental data, said there had been a ‘dramatic’ increase in the
number of companies looking for software to ‘report, manage and enhance
their CSR performance in an auditable and sustainable manner’.
The
new statistics offer one of the first quantifiable insights into the
areas of service provision that CSR practitioners are seeking. EP hopes they will reveal changing patterns of interest over time.
In the first six weeks, the online directory had nearly 24,000 page impressions.
One
closely watched area, given complaints from pressure groups of too much
‘greenwash’, will be the demand for advice from communications firms.
Searches
for public relations firms numbered a healthy 93, but only just crept
into the top ten and were roughly on a par with searches for providers
offering advice on benchmarking and codes of conduct.
Among
specific areas of CSR activity, stakeholder relations commanded the
greatest number of searches, closely followed by community relations
and ethical supply chain management. Searches for consultants offering
expertise in staff involvement, work-life balance and diversity ran at
about a third of that level. The under-served markets category
generated the fewest searches.
The service providers that
cropped up most frequently in search results (all global or UK unless
specified) included Acona, Cause & Effect, Community Business
(China), csrnetwork, Ecofys, E2 Management Consulting Switzerland),
Ernst & Young, Fair Labor Association (US), Forética (Spain),
Future Perfect, Sd3, SGS, The Virtuous Circle, and Umweltberatung
Hoeppner CSR Consulting (Germany).
The directory, which is
also available as a 68-page printed publication, is used by CSR
practitioners to find firms that can assist in developing corporate
responsibility programmes and policies. It lists 480 providers in all.
