Making Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Participatory and Locally Visible – a Prototype Solution

Abstract: Traditional Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)-programs rarely include participatory
components that connect CSR-activities of private companies with their local communities.
However, there is an increasing demand to include citizens as well as the resources and expertise of
the private sector in the design and implementation of local community planning processes. To
assess the potential, opportunities, and challenges of including private companies into participatory
community planning at a local level, we analyzed the experiences that we collected during the
piloting phase and the commercial roll-out of the ‘Bürgercockpit’-application for citizen participation,
as well as the results of a digital CSR-questionnaire that we shared with different companies in
Austria. Our research indicates that most of the participating companies are interested in including
local communities into their CSR-projects using a digital tool, if this tool is easy-to-use, easy-to-
access, and provides a flexible structure to address specific project requirements as well as properly
designed features for stakeholder communication and user feedback. The findings of both, the
‘Bürgercockpit’-pilot study and the CSR-questionnaire provided us valuable input for designing a
prototype solution of a digital CSR-tool for participatory community planning at a local level as well
as recommendations for future research in this topic of growing interest.