A shared commitment to integrity: Examining collaborative PR leadership

By David Remund, assistant professor at the University of Oregon, and Brooke Weberling McKeever, assistant professor at the University of South Carolina

Much has been studied about leadership and ethics within corporations, within nonprofit organizations and within public relations practice. To our knowledge, though, no studies have examined where these three areas intersect. Specifically, how do corporations and nonprofit partners reach a mutual commitment to leadership and ethics as it relates to corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs? What operating principles and values do they share?

CSR studies often focus on programs, messages and/or stakeholder impact, but not the partnerships between the corporations and the nonprofit organizations. These private-public partnerships constitute the very heart of CSR (i.e., CSR programs could not exist or thrive without nonprofit partners).

Leadership and ethics are particularly important to understand within the nonprofit and corporate sectors because of increased public scrutiny and the desire for more transparency. How do corporations vet nonprofit partners and forge sustainable partnerships? And how do nonprofits decide which corporations will help enhance (and not hurt) their brand and the mission?

Our research seeks to answer these important questions. More specifically, we will interview CSR leaders from diverse corporations that have been ranked among the Top 100 Best Corporate Citizens by Corporate Responsibility Magazine. We will also interview their counterparts at the nonprofit organizations associated with these CSR programs. From the interviews, we will determine how shared values and communications infrastructure relate to existing models of PR leadership and ethics.

We will see where similarities and differences exist on the corporate and nonprofit sides of these important partnerships, with the goal of identifying best practices for how the two sectors can work together most efficiently to create and communicate social good through CSR programs. This research, supported by a Page Legacy Scholar Grant, will fill a significant gap in the literature while yielding practical advice for practitioners working in CSR and the nonprofit sector, or for those aspiring to do so.

For further information on this study, please email Dr. Remund at dremund@uoregon.edu or Dr. McKeever at brookew@mailbox.sc.edu.