I’ve never come across a business unwilling to boast about its corporate responsibility efforts. My inbox is stuffed with press releases from companies about the epic bike rides, marathons, mountain ascents and trips deep into the developing world that their employees have undertaken in aid of their charity of the year.
Sometimes, the PR agencies hired to produce these releases overlook some of the more basic details of the partnership. As they get carried away with business jargon and PR fluff, they can forget to include essential stuff like how much was raised and how. But they are usually more than happy to go and find out the fundamentals needed for a news story – the who, what, where, when, why and how – even though they might not know the answers at first and it can take a while to get them.
Then last week, I received a press release about a Scottish company, Saltire Energy, giving £1m to a local charity, Befriend A Child. The exchange I subsequently had with the PR agency, thinkPR (Scotland), left me fuming. The strategy they have come up with to try and show this company as generous and community-minded is, to my mind, misguided and counter-productive.
Initially, I thought this was a fairly decent story – the donation was more than double the charity’s income. But the release failed to mention why this company had given the charity this windfall – just that it was part of the Saltire in the Community initiative. So I asked for more information about it – whether all its awards were this size, how the charity was chosen and so on. The PR came back to say the initiative “gives support and assistance to a number of projects and individuals”. I was told Michael Loggie had met with the charity to find out how the company could assist and, when hearing about its work, quickly decided to award enough funds to clear the charity’s waiting list of children and train enough volunteers to support them.
Michael Loggie, it turned out, is the company’s chief executive, who is famous north of the border for being the highest paid Scot . Fantastic, I thought – the head of the company is so impressed by the charity’s work that it hands them a transformational donation.
I asked the PR again,for some examples of other recent donations – how much, to which charities, how the charities are chosen. This is when the story ran into difficulties from my point of view. The PR refused to provide any details about the community initiative – not even the average amount it awards – that would enable me to put the Befriend A Child gift into context. I was put through to the chief PR in charge of the account, who was a lot more open, but only about the fact that their caginess was down to their “strategy”. The company would be making more donations to other charities so – bizarrely – they didn’t want to give away any more details about the initiative so they could ensure maximum publicity for each gift.
I’m not sure how giving me some idea about the past work of this initiative would in any way harm the super-duper PR they have planned for future donations. I do know that we won’t be giving the company’s corporate responsibility activities any coverage unless it is willing to provide the basic information journalists need for a news story. I did a quick news search and couldn’t find any other coverage of this donation online, so maybe other felt the same. The unfortunate thing is that the charity concerned has missed out on publicity because of the company’s somewhat unusual PR tactics.