Course Ref: PR.4

Course Subject: Public Relations

Who should attend?

• Executives involved in strategic and operational functions, including finance, corporate strategy, human resources, supplier or community relations, and government affairs
• Senior managers involved in setting up corporate governance or CSR initiatives
• Corporate lawyers who wish to improve their understanding of new company law developments concerning corporate responsibility
• Stakeholder managers responsible for their organisation’s dealings with the community, their employees and elsewhere
• Managers involved in developing, implementing and monitoring change programmes to improve standards of corporate behaviour and business conduct

Course objectives

• To understand why corporate social responsibility is important in the public and private sectors.
• To examine how organisational behaviour is impacted by CSR
• To develop skills to initiate or improve CSR programmes in their organisations
• To discover the legal duties company directors must observe concerning CSR
• To examine examples of good and bad business behaviour across different industrial sectors
• To explore how business ethics, corporate social responsibility and corporate governance are converging
• To develop the components of a CSR action plan for their own organisations

Course content

What is Corporate Social Responsibility and why does it matter?

• The pressure for change
• The Legal Background of CSR
• Company directors’ obligations and CSR
• Voluntary measures
• Is CSR “Just Public Relations”?
• CSR and corporate governance links

Best practice in CSR – corporate approaches on the key topics

• Codes of Practice
• Dealing with communities
• CSR and employees
• Managing suppliers responsibly
• Responsible client relations
• Corporate Responsibility and the environment

The Business Case for Corporate Social Responsibility

• The Strategic Imperatives involved in CSR
• What is a business case?
• USING tools to build the business case
• Identifying and Managing CSR risks
• The public procurement challenges from CSR
• Getting and maintaining corporate support and approval

Changing the Organisation to include CSR

• Developing the CSR corporate vision
• Setting our CSR strategic SMART objectives
• Identifying and Managing affected stakeholders
• How leaders make CSR happen
• The key steps to make the CSR change effective

Developing and implementing the CSR plan

• What should be in the CSR plan?
• Communicating the plan
• Piloting the plan
• Overcoming objections
• Measuring impact and results
• Auditing and reviewing CSR performance
• Reporting on CSR