The involvement of communities in the development and delivery of csr policies

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To whom it may concern,

My name is [Name]. I am contacting you on behalf of the Richardson Institute. Established in 1959, the Richardson Institute is the oldest Peace Studies institute in the UK. It engages in contemporary research into broad questions around peace and conflict with a strong knowledge exchange component.

I am a research intern at the institute and my team is currently working jointly with Maslaha. Maslaha ('for the common good' in Arabic) creates new ways of tackling long-standing issues affecting communities. Maslaha combine imagination and craftsmanship to improve services, change attitudes and challenge systems of inequality.

We are currently working on a project that assesses the involvement of corporations in the community and the scale of community involvement aspect in their wider corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy. We are contacting you because we would appreciate your input on our report in the form of either a telephone or Skype interview or email correspondence, whichever would be most convenient. We would ideally record telephone or Skype interviews in order to ensure accuracy in our report but if you would prefer not to be recorded please indicate this on the attached consent form. I would like to assure you that all the records are protected under the Data Protection Act, 1998 and would be terminated after the submission of the final report.

Just to give you a brief overview, the areas that would be touched upon during the interview include:

- What do you view as corporate social responsibility (CSR)?

-Do you currently have any CSR initiatives within your corporation? If so, could you outline these projects for us?

-How are your CSR initiatives structured? Is there a specific CSR policy team, is CSR inbuilt into general policies or do you work with external bodies on CSR?

- How important and relevant do you feel these policies are to the community?

- What feedback, if any, do you collect on the effectiveness of your CSR policies?

-What impact does CSR policy have on your organisation? (e.g. community engagement, positive PR, increased interaction with smaller/local companies etc.)

- How frequently is your organisation involved in CSR activities? Are your CSR activities ongoing policies or individual projects?

We look forward to hearing from you,

Thank you, [Name] Richardson Institute.

APPENDIX B- QUESTIONNAIRE

●What is their definition of CSR?

1) What do you view as CSR?

● How they run CSR?

2) What are your CSR projects?

3) Are there any specific areas you have focused on with your CSR projects?

4) What structure have you adopted to realise these projects?

5) Do you have an independent department dealing with CSR? (If we haven’t found out on their website)

6) What is the scale of these projects? (locally, nationwide)

7) How is it implemented? (At branch level)

8) Which division of your organisation is leading in influencing your CSR policy?

9) Where does the initiative for your CSR come from? (Managers, employees)

10) How important and relevant do you feel these policies are to the community?

11) How do you raise public awareness of your projects?

● How they decide what CSR to perform?

12) What influenced you to invest in the CSR projects you’ve invested in?

13) Can or in what way, can your CSR policy be influenced by external organisations? (charity, government)

14) What is the current scale of your CSR policy? (global, local)

● Feedback

15) What feedback if any do you collect on the effectiveness of your CSR policies?

16) Can we have a look at some of the feedback of your latest projects?

17) How do you assess the effectiveness of your CSR policies?

18) What feedback do you collect or receive?

19) What impact on your organisation does your CSR policy have?

20) What capacity if any is there for changing and improving a CSR project?

21) How often do you review your CSR strategy?

22) What aspects affects the level of investment you put into CSR? (e.g. politicians market health)

23) Did the market crash of 2008 affect your investment in CSR?

24) Did your CSR strategy change following the financial crisis of 2008?

25) How frequently is your organisation involved in CSR activities? (built into contract, time)

26) What percentage of turnover do you invest in CSR?