CSI (Corporate Social Impact) is the new CSR. It's not just about doing good things. it's about having impact. And corporations are getting hip to that message. Witness CECP's kickoff of the latest iteration of their acclaimed Corporate Giving Standard (CGS). Whereas CGS was once a measurement system for tracking corporate giving, the new CGS-Impact framework now extends the CGS concept to measuring outcomes as well as "inputs" of corporate giving.

What difference are corporations really making? what types of social and business impacts are being generated? how are they quantified? how do they stack up to other corporations? how can corporations improve their ROI? All of this was discussed at the most recent CECP Results Summit (June 28-29). CECP is the first national organization of funders to take on this issue at a sector-wide level.

This, at a time when the true impact of corporate social responsibility is being given significant media attention. See the article entitled "Philanthropy, Inc." in the latest issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review. Also, check out the attached by Professor Bhattacharya : Download doing_better_at_doing_good.pdf. Both articles point to the trend in CSR toward actually measuring results and delivering value for the corporation. In particular, Bhattacharya points out that what creates value for corporation is more than simply the appearance of caring, but actually leveraging CSR to influence consumer behavior. Nonprofits are becoming more strategic in their orientation and fundraising to accommodate the types of impacts corporate funders are interested in generating. All this is further toward a more sustainable model of philanthropy--one i refer to as Market-Based Philanthropy (MBP)--where nonprofit work is more hard-wired into the economy, and therefore more sustainable. More on MBP can be found here...

JAS