Giving Compass' Take:

• In this podcast, Toby Usnik, author of  The Caring Economy: How to Win with Corporate Social Responsibility, and Daniel Korschun, an associate marketing professor at Drexel University, discuss the importance of investing time in corporate social responsibility.

• How is your employer engaging in corporate social responsibility? How can individual donors encourage employee giving programs?

• Here are five elements of a model of corporate social responsibility.

Corporate social responsibility has increasingly become an important component for businesses. According to the Governance and Accountability Institute, 86% of the S&P 500 Index companies published sustainability or corporate responsibility reports in 2018.

In fact, CSR is so important that is has become a business discipline integral to the corporate mission statement. But doing this also requires strategy, analysis and conviction because it is not a one-size-fits-all. What are the best practices of CSR to ensure success and make the biggest impact?

Toby Usnik is author of  The Caring Economy: How to Win with Corporate Social Responsibility and founder of Philanthropic Impact Partners. Daniel Korschun is an associate marketing professor at Drexel University and the author of  We Are Market Basket. They joined the Knowledge@Wharton radio show on SiriusXM to talk about the expanding role of corporate social responsibility.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows:

Knowledge@Wharton: It feels like more firms in the last decade have recognized the importance of corporate social responsibility and pulling it into their daily operations and structure. Would you agree?

Daniel Korschun: Yes, the idea has been around at least since the 1800s, and you can find it even farther back than that in the ancient Greeks. But it has really taken hold in the last maybe 20 years in that it has really shown some explosive growth. A lot of the reason is just because the general public now is much more aware of whom they’re buying from.

Read the full article about corporate social responsibility at Knowledge@Wharton.