Corporate social responsibility – a challenge for Russian PR professionals

by Nina Kinnunen

VTsIOM is one of the biggest and most well-known Russian public opinion research centers. On their site one can find many interesting poll results about what Russians think of different themes, especially about politics and economics. The center has not conducted polls directly about PR practices or PR’s image (at least could not find any), but I was able to find this opinion poll conducted in 2007 about corporate social responsibility. (Even though there is an English version of the site, unfortunately this particular poll is not available in English, nor are some other contents).

According to the results 61 % of respondents said that Russian companies cannot be described as socially responsible actors. 39 % of respondents thought that the state is more socially responsible than companies (vice versa only 14 %). 29 % thought that neither the state nor the companies can be said to be socially responsible. The respondents were also asked to mention companies they thought to be socially responsible ones. The five most often mentioned companies were: Sberbank, Lukoil, Gazprom, Russian railways and Aeroflot. However, none of them gained a considerable percentage. (The poll was conducted in 150 different spots in 39 regions, amount of respondents 1600, margin of error 3,4 %.)

There seems to be a significant gap between Russians’ expectations and the perceived reality on corporate social responsibility. Majority of people were not happy with how governmental or business organizations took care of their societal responsibilities. And I do not think this situation has significantly changed within two years. This means a huge challenge for PR practitioners. Undoubtedly CSR has and still is badly despised in many Russian organizations. Working as the "corporate conscience" can be thus really hard. But even if the organization does put real effort on being a socially responsible actor and communicating about it, people in general are very distrustful and skeptical. So it is hard to work as a “consensus creator” between the organization and its stakeholders, even if the PR professionals have the organizational support they need in communicating about CSR.

Ok, this is it then, my last post for our blog. I already want to say thank you for the interesting comments I have received (but this does not of course mean that you could not still send them!). I hope I have been able to offer some interesting bits and pieces about how PR has developed in Russia within the last 20 years or so. I also want to thank all course participants for your interesting blog entries.

Writing this blog has been an interesting experience. I have learned about the development of PR in Russia and some other ex-Soviet countries, and also some things about blogging too. It is always rewarding to understand not only what is going on at the moment, but why the things are the way they are now, and what the paths have been that have led to the present situation - and that will also have an effect on the future. Trying to gather the “big picture” of some former Soviet Union countries’ PR field’s development has been quite a task. Tomorrow (24.11) in our presentation we will try to show you what kind of a picture our group has been able to gather. See you then!



USED SOURCES:

VTsIOM start site in English.
http://wciom.com/

VTsIOM. Rating of socially responsible companies. 14.5.2007.
http://wciom.ru/arkhiv/tematicheskii-arkhiv/item/single/8167.html?no_cache=1&cHash=777429e427