With this week’s bold announcement by Laurence Fink, founder and chief executive of BlackRock, we thought it’d be a perfect time to show you how to search for the CSR initiatives of public companies within Sentieo.
This week, the executives of many large public companies received a letter from Fink which suggested that they not only make profits for shareholders, but also that they engage in social good if they desire the backing of BlackRock:
“Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.” (NY Times)
With climate change, workplace culture, and data security making headlines recently, we wanted to see how much companies are really discussing corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental social governance (ESG).
We did a quick search in Sentieo to find mentions of these themes in earnings calls transcripts, press releases, presentations, and sustainability disclosures (red bars below), as well as keyword mentions on Twitter (green line below).
There has been a drastic increase in public companies’ focus on “social good” topics over last 10 years, mirrored by a parallel jump in Twitter mentions. We expect this trend to only continue in the next few years as announcements like BlackRock’s become more common, and companies take a closer look at contributing to sustainability projects, growing workplace diversity, and giving back to their communities.
A few well-known companies appearing in our search results that are already incorporating corporate social responsibility into their future plans are: Hasbro (HAS), Cisco (CSCO), and Herman Miller (MLHR). Check out one of Hasbro’s press releases below:
Cisco (CSCO) also had a full report on 2017 Corporate Social Responsibility:
We also used Sentieo Plotter to plot the mentions of “corporate social responsibility” across Cisco’s documents over the last 10 years (red), Cisco’s stock price (blue) and Twitter mentions of “corporate social responsibility” (green). All three have steadily increased over time.
As both consumers and investors take a more critical eye to how products and services are created and delivered — demanding full transparency — public companies will need to take an honest, internal look at their social impact and how it will affect their ability to succeed in the future.
To perform your own searches on corporate social responsibility or any other keywords you need to research, try our free trial of Sentieo. We always want to hear your feedback and ideas for the product.
Article by Denise Martinez, Sentieo
