What is Corporate Social Responsibility? - InnoTrain CSR

Communication of CSR
6.3. The delicate balance between sponsoring and CSR
In short
In contrast to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the communication and
promotion tool sponsoring is based on a contractual agreement governing the
sponsor's performances and the recipient's services in return. However, as
soon as sponsoring is used to promote projects in the form of public
sponsoring, it is considered a CSR commitment, similar to corporate
sponsoring. But CSR is generally misunderstood if sponsoring is
communicated indiscriminately as CSR, while the company's core business
remains unaffected by a socially and ecologically focused subsistence
strategy.
Learning targets
� Question the correlation between sponsoring and CSR and get to know
analogous goals of the communication tool sponsoring and CSR
CSR learning contents
The professional approach to sponsoring activities starts with the analysis of the
company's image or brand affinity with the sponsoring object. Branches such as
sports, culture, social affairs, environment, education and research as well as media
have established themselves in sponsoring. Generally, the purpose of sponsoring
consists in an image transfer in which the positive attributes of the sponsoring
recipient are transferred to the sponsor. Analogous to traditional sponsoringassociated
positioning methods, the CSR strategy can and should also check which
CSR activities possess a high image affinity with the respective company and its
corporate goals.
Companies generally use sponsoring projects to achieve high sympathy and
acceptance values, thus paving the way for a positive perspective for sponsoring
against the backdrop of the indifference opposite traditional advertising. In addition,
sponsoring mainly addresses target groups in non-commercial situations. The
resulting high interaction quality coupled with the sponsor's communicative message
in part reaches target groups (or stakeholders) which are difficult to approach with
similar messages. Such conditions are comparable to sponsoring and are
increasingly associated with CSR activities of companies.
The project "InnoTrain CSR" is organized by GILDE GmbH and has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the
views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. 12/2010
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