ESG, CSR and social value: how to make the most of the corporate opportunity

Understanding the language

Let’s first frame the scene by unpacking the terminology. Starting with the acronyms, designed to give you less to say while befuddling your listeners.

(These definitions are mine, feel free to improve or take issue with them.)

• ESG stands for environmental, social and governance

ESG strategies, policies, statements, frameworks, ‘things’ are essentially about corporate risk management in the pursuit of ethical and sustainable business practice. A business uses ESG to describe the care it will pay to the world in which it operates, the communities it impacts, including the way it conducts itself operationally and legally in pursuit of these commitments.  ESG is also important for a business credibility, shareholder relationships and money/investment: socially conscious investors will use ESG frameworks and commitments to screen potential investments.

ESG statements and strategies in the public domain can be big brushwork. Large canvas, arresting, bold. That’s not to say you won’t find finer paint work and detailing: but there’s also a lot of verbiage. I’ve read lots of ESG strategies and while I usually understand the concepts and intentions well enough, I’m a delivery nerd and quite often find myself muttering ‘what does this mean?’ and/or ‘how will this happen?’

In relation to advancing digital inclusion, you’ll usually find digital inclusion under the ‘S’ commitment/pillar of ESG. And the big brush stroke might be something like  ‘to promote and support digital inclusion in our communities to 5m beneficiaries by 2030’.

• CSR is corporate social responsibility

CSR intersects with ESG and they should align; they’re in the same ball park. CSR ‘things’ are proactive and intentional as opposed to simply visionary and/or aspirational.  They describe the way the business and its employees will drive responsible behaviours, policies and practices in and through the work they do, and in the way they work.  Delivery nerds may find CSR more approachable/intelligible, because it draws out the ‘how’.

In relation to advancing digital inclusion, an example of a CSR digital inclusion commitment might be ‘trained employee volunteers delivering basic digital skills training sessions in their local communities’. And with any luck there’ll be numbers and timeframes attached to these as well.

• Social value commitments in public sector tendering and how they relate to DI

Social value can be achieved through both ESG and CSR behaviours and practices. However social value commitments are legal requirements in public sector tendering.

In the UK, public sector procurement is the process by which government bodies - including central departments, the NHS and local authorities - purchase goods, works and services from external suppliers. This expenditure accounts for approximately £300 billion annually. 

Following the 2012 Public Services Act, public sector buyers must consider how their procurement choices improve economic, social, and environmental well-being in their relevant areas. Further changes in 2020 - 2025 introduced a mandatory framework to ensure delivering "more than just the contract" counts for 10% of the total evaluation score of any bid; and that SVCS should be aligned with the Government's five National Missions. These range from "kickstarting the economy" to "building an NHS fit for the future" .

The 2025 DSIT plan identifies digital inclusion as a necessary condition for all five government missions to succeed. 

This means including digital inclusion in SVCs is no long a "nice to have" consideration, it is a core strategic requirement. 

In relation to advancing digital inclusion, an example might be a telecoms provider supplying digital healthcare services to a hospital that invests a percentage of the contract in running community digital health skills programmes.

Combining and synthesising: the sum of the parts

There are many examples of digital inclusion being supported by corporates through one, and sometimes several, of these levers/ routes in.

But the really smart money is, literally, on those corporates who can use all their levers on digital inclusion in a symbiotic, complementary way.

This can happen by combining building internal ‘DI smarts’ and capacity (driven through ESG, CSR) with external delivery ignited by social value commitments.

What does this look like in practice?

To my mind the two best examples of the ‘trifecta approach’ to digital inclusion come from Virgin Media O2 and Capgemini. We’ve been involved with both, and we’ve learned a lot from both.

Capgemini’s ‘trifecta evolution’ in particular has been fascinating and make no mistake involved a lot of hard work, tenacity and adaption.

This is a snapshot of how they’ve combined and leveraged agendas and priorities.

VMO2 – Connect More

ESG, CSR and social value commitments are all at play in VMO2’s support of digital inclusion.

VMO2 does not talk much (in the public domain) about CSR as a mechanic, or strategic principle, while there’s a lot of mention of ESG. We know from our diagrams that one does not equal the other, and my observation would be that in delivering against its ESG strategy the business behaves with corporate social responsibility.

There is a lot information on the Connect More pages. The headline is that they combine, cross fertilise and leverage their DI investments and activities across these domains:

• ESG:through tech recycling project ‘Community Calling’ with Capita and Hubbub
• ESG: also by giving mobile data (and grant funding) to the National Databank
• Social value  as in Social value commitments in Manchester
• And my favourite bit, ESG and social value commitments using employee volunteering capacity to support digital inclusion and digital skills training sessions in the community, including in areas where digital inclusion social value commitments have been made.

Capgemini

Again, the triple whammy, and what’s unique about Capgemini to my mind is that skills development is the golden thread running through everything they do when it comes to digital inclusion. And that’s as much an internal commitment as an external one.

• Capgemini do have digital inclusion commitments within both their ESG and CSR strategies and statements, there are links below which will take you to these. When I refer to ‘ESG/ CSR’ in the bullets below, it’s because the activities described align with and complement both.
• ESG/ CSR: Capgemini (UK) has a whole business digital inclusion training programme, Inspire, and talented and committed people who manage it. Working across the business, department by department, they engage their people in Inspire and in making digital skills pledges. As well as colleagues completing Inspire in a self-directed way, they’ve also developed a facilitator team of Inspire graduates who do this through online workshops as well.
• ESG/ CSR: Inspire graduates have further DI opportunities. This includes delivering ‘Meet Ups’ to our Digital Champion Network members. These are ‘community of practice’ sessions on digital skills and practice and we plan and schedule them together. And also ‘Kit Bag’ sessions, which is a format Capgemini has developed; more in depth (online) digital skills and productivity sessions, again for VCSE audience. Inspire graduates may also be offered digital inclusion and skills opportunities in support of social value commitments online and in the field.
• Social value: Capgemini have a social value playbook with a menu of DI options that can be put together according to the type of SV commitment required and the needs of the local population. They talk about the various DI commitments fitting together as in a ‘dry stone wall’ where small, medium and large stones all have their place.
• Social value: the biggest stones are the place-based Let’s Get Digital projects, with a local embedded project lead, which build Digital Champion capacity in the local VCSE and public sector, enabling the community to build and nurture its own digital inclusion and skills.
• Social value, ESG and CSR: all the elements combine as Capgemini use their ESG/CSR developed Inspire graduates to support and add value (small and medium stones) to place based Let’s Get Digital social value commitments where they can.

Betting on a digitally inclusive future

There is momentum building around digital inclusion, with the government recognising that it permeates every other agenda and social and societal objective. 

Cheering therefore to see there are already some pretty good trifecta tools in the toolbox. How about for starters:

• Encouraging – mandating? – business to adopt a trifecta approach to betting on digital inclusion and skills.
• Proactively supporting public sector and VSCE organisations to understand, very practically, how to describe their needs in ways that match big business’ ESG and CSR priorities.
• And proactively supporting social value commissioners to understand how they could require those commitments to be more strategic, complex and compound by leveraging multiple corporate agendas, not ‘just’ box ticking against MACs.