Sustainable Development Goals
How Blockchain Can Enhance Your CSR Footprint
Civic Ledger’s Corporate Social Responsibility reporting tool, Datasker
Trust is one of the biggest drivers for corporate success, so it is little wonder that companies are starting to put more time and energy into Corporate Social Responsibility.
Widely regarded as a PR exercise just two decades ago, CSR is now a high priority for today’s competitive, triple-bottom-line focused companies.
Why CSR is important
Corporations are clear CSR is no longer a nice-to-have but an absolute necessity and two aspects that have driven this shift are: changing consumer access to information and the global mandate to address global warming.
Consumers value socially and environmentally responsible companies
Today’s highly informed consumers are becoming more conscious about their product choices and the companies they purchase from. Increasingly, consumers want to know where their products come from, who makes them, what the working conditions are and what the carbon footprint of their products is.
Governments need to address emissions targets and UN SDGs
Governments are also under global pressure to work towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals — reduce carbon emissions, protect wild places and eliminate disease, war and poverty.
This, in turn, means more funding for companies that are aligned with sustainability goals, more regulation around natural asset extraction and heavier penalties for corporations that do not adopt cleaner, greener, more ethical practices and processes.
How companies are rising to the challenge of more meaningful CSR
The push for more meaningful CSR programs is not only driven by consumers and governments. Savvy companies know that effective CSR is good for their brands, good for their employees, good for communities and good for the environment. And so, we now see mainstream consumer brands like Addidas and L’Oreal investing heavily in circular economy initiatives as a result.
But it’s not enough to market these initiatives. Today’s corporations need to be able to prove they are doing what they say and that’s where blockchain comes in.
How blockchain enhances CSR
The bottom line is, blockchain technology enables companies to prove the claims they make — from the effectiveness of their environmental initiatives to their human rights record along the value chain. It also enables a smoother customer experience.
At Civic Ledger, we’ve seen a need to create a specific tool, Datasker, that supports robust CSR in organisations. Here’s why.
Supply chain transparency
Blockchain technology enables a smoother transaction experience at every level within the supply chain because compliance is inbuilt and the information in each block can only be built upon, not altered, making the data immutable and reliable.
Human errors and corruption are eliminated, reducing costs, minimising transaction delays, making processes more efficient and fairer.
From a marketing point of view, being able to empower customers to check the validity of a product’s claims creates trust, and when trust is won, customers are more likely to be loyal. Loyalty, in turn, lowers marketing costs because loyal customers are more likely to recommend a company to friends and colleagues and be repeat buyers.
Simplified auditing and compliance
Auditing is important to the compliance process and can be extremely expensive and time-consuming for companies. However, blockchain technology enables routine operating rules and compliance verification to be automated using smart contracts.
Blockchain automation simplifies auditing. It reduces costs and ensures the process is fair, efficient and error-free for all stakeholders in a transaction. For example, in natural capital trade, this technology can be applied to fair and efficient water allocations or emissions-offset trade.
In the case of CSR, blockchain technology enables organisations to provide immutable proof that they are fulfilling their obligations and promises.
A blockchain use case: water utilities
Reliability is the primary concern for water utilities. And, with population growth driving increased demand and water stress a key challenge for many regions, the Water Utilities of the Future Report (2018) highlighted the importance of CSR in creating safer, more efficient and accountable water utilities.
The report states that, to adapt to future challenges, water utilities will need to:
- become more collaborative and innovative
- provide better customer service for more proactive and informed water consumers
- digitally transform infrastructure and operations for better efficiency and safety
- provide integrated services, and
- add non-capital solutions to meet increasing demand.
For utilities, timely and accurate disclosure will be vital to ensure enhanced customer satisfaction and safety as well as efficiency and compliance.
Datasker
Datasker is a disclosure reporting tool built with blockchain technology. It enables water utilities to prove transactions, provide audit trails, and comply with ESG-related disclosure reporting requirements.
The efficiency and reputation-management gains from being able to automatically show proof of customer interactions and purchases, certify records of ESG and policy compliance and provide reliable real-time incident data online are potentially game-changing for utilities that want to minimise risk and media headlines.
The future of CSR is blockchain
Blockchain technology like Datasker enables a much higher level of transparency and visibility, and companies that are first to adopt will reap the rewards — consumer trust and loyalty, cost and time-savings, improved efficiency and safety, plus, potentially, government support for sustainability initiatives and innovation.
Is your company considering blockchain technology to improve CSR-related disclosure? Contact us to today to discuss implementing Datasker, Civic Ledger’s CSR solution for building consumer confidence and trust, built on the blockchain.
About Us
Civic Ledger is a multi-award-winning globally focused company building next-generation marketplaces with blockchain technology and smart contracts to create auditable ecosystems. Since our beginnings in late 2016, we understood the value proposition of blockchain to build markets of tomorrow to take accurate stock of shared public resources.
Through public-private collaborations, our approach builds on and replaces traditional markets, with the goal of producing more or better and transforming economies by establishing new technological and institutional information systems to solve the most pressing societal issues that are linked to the United Nation’s Sustainability Development Goals.
Digitising the ownership and tracking in real-time the issuance, use or exchange of shared public resources — both tangible and intangible assets — regulated by governments, next-generation marketplaces empower all participants to be accountable to the ecosystem which is a good thing for building public confidence and trust.
