Meeting Social Goals and Stakeholder Expectations

If you believe strongly that businesses have a responsibility to be good citizens, you've got a lot of company. Respondents to a recent McKinsey global survey on corporate philanthropy resoundingly say that consumers expect businesses to help society more these days. But if your corporate philanthropy program is highly effective at meeting social goals and stakeholder expectations, you would be in a more exclusive group. Only a fifth of respondents say they have reached that level. Those companies address social and political trends relevant to the business and are influenced by community and business needs. Executives at these companies also expect their programs to become more global and are more likely to involve collaboration with other businesses.

Which brings us to the fact that this year the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals, whose annual awards have focused on traditional measures of business results in alliances, handed out an award in a new category: corporate social responsibility. The recipients were Eli Lilly and Co., which won for its Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis Partnership, a global public-private alliance that is working to save lives by preventing and treating that disease, and Roche, which was honored for its Tamiflu Alliance Program, to address the potential threat of a global Avian flu pandemic. Both companies' programs work extensively with the World Health Organization, national governments, and N.G.O.s in a public-private collaboration to address global public health threats. Gilead Sciences received an Honorable Mention Award for its part in the Roche Tamiflu alliance.

I believe that most people think businesses' motivation in social responsibility is more about getting good PR than doing good things. But as more companies understand that big global challenges require innovative collaboration from multiple fronts--and act upon that understanding--John Q. Public will see that corporations are about more than the lapses in accounting judgment that make headlines.