IW Financial and CRO Analyze the Citizenship Efforts of Corporations

CRO's 100 Best Corporate Citizens 2008

CRO partnered with IW Financial to create their latest 100 Best Corporate Citizens list. The methodology emphasized the corporate responsibility efforts of large, impactful corporations in eight categories: Climate Change, Employee Relations, Environment, Financial, Governance, Human Rights, Lobbying and Philanthropy.

The 100 Best rankings, which were compiled without interviewing companies under consideration, were driven by the numbers. CRO and IW Financial worked together to remove as much subjectivity as possible from the evaluations.

CRO and IW Financial established the starting universe as U.S.-headquartered publicly traded large-cap companies, those in the Russell 1000. IW Financial analyzed about 150 data elements to complete a "score" within each category. Scores then determine the rankings within a category. The category rankings are then weighted to average into the total score. In addition, CRO did a final review to eliminate those companies which had been involved in a recent major public scandal.

Mark Bateman, Director of Research at IW Financial, commented, "While I might be able to guess which companies were going to make it onto the list, I didn’t know for sure. It is interesting to watch a company emerge as its score accumulates in the various categories. There may be some surprises for people on these lists, but the data speaks for itself. Based on the data and categories included in these evaluations, this is an unbiased evaluation of corporate citizenship."

So, who came out on top? The number one spot is occupied by Intel Corp. The key to achieving optimum ranks in 100 Best was to score well across a broad swath of corporate citizenship categories. Intel ranked in the top 100 in five of the eight categories, scoring its best mark in Environment (which measures environmental disclosures, policies and performance) and in the top 200 in another category, Philanthropy.

See the full list now (pdf). Read the CRO article.

CRO's 10 Best Corporate Citizens by Industry

CRO Magazine introduced "CRO's 10 Best Corporate Citizens by Industry 2007" based on research and analysis by IW Financial. CRO and IW Financial assessed the most influential U.S. public companies, drawn predominantly from the Russell 1000 Index, through the lens of eight categories: Environment, Climate Change, Human Rights, Employee Relations, Corporate Governance, Lobbying, Philanthropy, and Financial. The category rankings were then averaged to determine the "CRO's 10 Best" companies for each industry.

The September/October 2007 issue of CRO Magazine featured Part 1 of the "CRO's 10 Best" list covering large-cap, publicly traded companies in the Chemical, Energy, Financial, Media, and Utilities industries. Monsanto, Marathon Oil, Bank of America, Walt Disney and Entergy headed their sectors.

See the full Part 1 list now (pdf). Read the CRO article.

Part 2, released in the November/December 2007 issue, covered six additional industries. Eaton ranked first in the Auto & Vehicles sector. Weyerhauser and Temple-Inland tied at the top of the Paper industry. The Technology Hardware sector saw a tie between Intel and Cisco, while Adobe took the Technology Software category. The transport sector also had a tie for the number one spot between Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Sante Fe. Choice Hotels leads the Travel & Lodging industry.

See the full Part 2 list now (pdf). Read the CRO article.