ACCORDING to www.soccerex.com, monitoring and evaluating the success of most corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs for professional sport teams and organizations fall under four categories—community involvement, youth education, health and philanthropy.
The majority of football clubs and organizations have a CSR strategy, some better than the others, but with something as new and underdeveloped as CSR in sport, it is difficult to judge whether these are effective or not.
One method of doing so is through monitoring and evaluation (M&E). In recent times, there has been an increasing focus on M&E in sport. This is due to a variety of different reasons such as increased competition for donor funding, the need to measure results and progress, to be more accountable to stakeholders, strategic long-term thinking and to demonstrate effectiveness of sport as a tool for development.
The article continues by saying “Projects are usually evaluated by looking at milestones, outputs and outcomes. All these are useful in measuring the impact of sport but it is important to recognize the circumstances of each project during evaluation as it is not an exact science and, therefore, cannot be generalized. It is also important to mention that while milestones and outputs are relatively easy to measure, outcomes are where the impact is generally made and these are often intangible and, therefore, harder to prove.”
The first portion of the article says that due to accountability to donors and stakeholders, there has to be tangible results like documentation and liquidation reports. The second part of the article says that the results are harder to prove because they are intangible. There is no hard and fast rule to measure the impact of CSR through sports. There is no manual for it.
In a paper written by Heledd Jenkins and Laura James entitled “It’s Not Just a Game: Community work in the UK Football Industry and Approaches to Corporate Social Responsibility,” Jenkins and James say that “while many community trusts undertake a certain amount of measurement, the overall impression is that more needs to be done to get a true picture of the impact of community work and to better capture the benefits both to the club and community.”
The closest thing to a measurement of the impact or effectiveness of a CSR undertaking through sports is documentation of CSR activities like the number of hits on the team’s web site or homepage; exposure on tri-media namely print, TV and radio; increase in tickets sold for home games; increase in sales of team merchandise; number of “Likes” on Facebook; re-tweets on Twitter; and an increase in the number of sponsors.
On the paper written by Seung Pil Lee “Measuring and Leveraging the Contribution of Sport to Business and Society,” he cites two CSR activities through sports:
- “Unicef and FC Barcelona signed a five-year partnership to raise awareness and funds to benefit children affected by HIV and AIDS. FC Barcelona donates €1.5 million per year over five years to help fund projects aimed at combating HIV and AIDS in Africa and Latin America. Along with the funding, the football club is featuring the Unicef logo on its 2006-2007 jersey, the first placement of its kind in the club’s 107-year history. This commitment to Unicef and the world’s children reinforces FC Barcelona’s motto, More Than a Club” (Unicef, 2009).
- “The world’s largest corporate running series is continuing its long-standing tradition of supporting charities and institutions that contribute to an overall quality of life in the communities served by JPMorgan Chase. In 2009 the series will donate more than $600,000 to charities and organizations in host cities around the world. The JPMorgan Chase Foundation makes a donation for each entry in the Corporate Challenge Series” (JPMorgan Chase & Co., 2009).
The tangible results here could be, in the case of FC Barcelona, more web site hits, more exposure for Unicef’s advocacy, players who’d want to transfer to FC Barcelona because of the image they will project as a result of their partnership with Unicef.
As for JPMorgan Chase, not just more views and hits on their web site, but perhaps more business and clients for them. Who wouldn’t want to do business with a company heavily involved in CSR through sports.
There is really no blueprint to determine the success or failure of a CSR activity, the results or outcome are both tangible and intangible.
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THE National University (NU) Bulldogs showed us that defense truly wins championships, and it will win it for you after 60 years. Coach Eric Altamirano’s goal was to hold the high-octane Far Eastern University Tamaraw offense to below 60 points and he and his players did just that in Games Two and Three, so congratulations all around to the NU Community.