Third Weekend of Class - Corporate Social Responsibility ( CSR )

In the third and final weekend of class we discussed Corporate Social Responsibility ( CSR ). We went over CSR in the news, the different ways companies define CSR activities, and what is CSR. We then discussed whether companies should be doing CSR and why they are doing it currently.
In this area we discussed the steps in evolution for CSR. We identified where companies are in the steps and where they should strive to be. Below is the slide that was used in class, provided by Dr. Jane Machin

We continued with several benefits companies can gain by getting to the opportunity stage of CSR. In the opportunity stage, CSR is strategic and supports the core business objectives of the organization. These core competencies are then leveraged to create positive business value as well as shared value in social change.

The next post CACI CSR will go through the following process as well. 

In order to identify potential issues to go after, a company must:

1.  Understand their current CSR programs
2. Know their current business objectives
3. Be able to list their core competencies
4. Now, you must embrace the stakeholders
5. Look and observe what your competitors and industry are doing and compare them to your current programs and core competencies

Once you have this drawn out. It is important to evaluate the issues identified. It is important to identify which are most important, feasible, and authentic to the organization. This will give you the best competitive advantage.

You then want to generate solutions. You can look at Hypothesis Driven Marketing to help aid this. Re-framing the problem will help create solutions.

Then the organization needs to implement the solutions. This will help with support from higher management. Targets need to be set and embedded in core functions and it is better to make the commitments public.

Some of the critical success factors that were identified were that an organizations CSR activities need to be:

• strategic
• consistent
• authentic
• measurable
• reportable
• simple

If you can directly align your CSR activities to strategy, draw a straight line from your activity to profit, you are more likely to succeed and grow shared value within the business and community.

CACI CSR

In this blog, I will discuss CSR at CACI Int Inc. I will go through a short exercise that we did in class in order to determine where CACI should be with CSR strategically. This means what current or future CSR activities are aligned with CACI's core competencies that are most feasible for the company to create competitive advantage.

To start off, CACI's current CSR activities are under the umbrella "CACI Cares".
The current CSR activities fall under these groups:

1. The Troops
• Deploying Talent - Creating Careers (provides careers for talented veterans with disabilities)
• Hire a Vet Today (which gives hiring managers the opportunity to join our recruiters at career fairs) 
• Sponsors and Donates to
• Cause (Comfort for America's Uniformed Services)
• Fisher House Foundation
• Project Healing Waters
• USO
2. Education

• Scholarship Program, in conjunction with the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (CACI sponsors five college undergraduate scholarships of $1,500 per year for up to four years of college undergraduate study. Three of these scholarships are awarded to college-bound children of full-time, regular CACI employees, while two scholarships are awarded to applicants outside of CACI who demonstrate excellence in the fields of science, math or technology.)
• Heart of America - Books From The Heart^® (Conducts book drives for under-resourced elementary schools in their local communities.)
• In2Books (In2Books secure digital platform to help enhance children's reading, writing, and critical thinking skills.)
•  Junior Achievement (JA) (Gives employees an opportunity to provide classroom assistance that helps students develop strong educational and life skills.CACI supports the annual JA Bowl fundraising event, with more than 250 employees participating. Employees also volunteer at JA Day, which introduces elementary school students to JA programs.

      3.  Community

• CACI Cares encourages employees to volunteer as individuals and groups in support of their local communities. 
• Each month, CACI also spotlights a national charity to which employees can volunteer, participate, or donate to make a difference in their local communities.
• CACI also gives back to its own employees in need - we raise funds and donations of vacation time or other needed items for those who find themselves in difficult situations.
• Past Programs Include:
• American Heart Association
• Capital Area Food Bank
• Make-A-Wish Foundation
• Special Olympics
• Leukemia & Lymphoma Society
• Marine Corps Marathon
• Toys for Tots
• Veterans Moving Forward
• Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts
• Wreaths Across America

      4.  Donations - Will be given as long as the following guidelines are met. This is what is stated from he website:

CACI Cares is honored to support a variety of charitable causes. All formal requests for grants, in-kind assistance or other types of support should be sent in writing along with proof of your organization's 501(c)(3) status. Please be patient, as it may take us up to six weeks to respond to requests.

• Guidelines:
  • Include a specific description of your organization and project, your contact information, and any relevant program history.
  • Recipients must be IRS-approved 501(c)(3) organizations. We cannot fund individuals, for-profit organizations, essentially religious or political organizations.
  • The activities of recipient organizations must support core educational initiatives, warfighters and veterans, or community citizenship.
  • Contributions are restricted to specific projects or programs only, not general operating accounts.
  • CACI Philanthropy will not support requests for programs deemed to be discriminatory based on race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, national origin, or physical or mental disability.

Now that we have the list of current CACI CSR initiatives, I will look at CACI Core Competencies. I have found that is difficult to determine these based off of the broad business that we are involved in. Generally speaking we operate globally,  and provide solutions and services as a contractor to the federal government in multiple capacities. Even though it is not listed, I know that we are deeply rooted in providing media and marketing for other organizations to include, the National Guard, Exxon Mobile, and other commercial customers. I feel that we should expand into this area for growth since we do such a great job at it.

Given this information, I believe CACi is in the Tax/Expense areas on the continuum of CSR. Some of the CSR activities fall under a Defensive posture and others are under the Good Citizen approach that they push their employees to conduct for them. Engagement is low, since I work for them but had to search for our activities. I rarely ever see anything from corporate on these. Mission is peripheral and the resources spent are extremely small. The scope of activities are narrow and they have little to no strategic value.

Looking at CACI's Core Competencies, it would have more of an impact if their CSR initiatives were more global. Developing some solutions or services that the federal government would be interested in purchasing in order to aid in their CSR would be a great idea. It is also important to understand that it is the people that are hired that create these solutions and services that are then purchased by the federal government thus creating profit.  CACI needs their CSR activities to bring in the highest quality and best employees. It is great that they offer Veteran Services but they do not execute to the fullest. We don't attend may shows or events anymore due to budget cuts so these efforts are slowly being lost. Education is a great one if they offered more to their current employees. If they gave a percentage of tuition reimbursement to the family of the employee and not just the tax break amount to the employee, they may get more qualified employees to come work for them instead of the competitor. They could even include a minimum work time for the amount given so that they aren't at risk of losing money. This would be a great shared value situation and really bring some talent to the company.

Everything else that is being conducted come from the employees reaching out on their own. This is great but I wish they spotlighted the employees themselves and not just umbrella it under the CACI name but share the experience with the employees that are doing these efforts.

Re-Framing for CACI

In this post, I will expand on my previous post on Hypothesis Driven Marketing using a re-framing technique with CACI as an example.

To start, my problem that I will use came from one of my first posts called Listening to CACI Groundswell and Determining and Insight. The insight was " If you want to work for CACI, you need to know someone currently working for them." I will use THNK.ORG's process to Re-Frame the problem. 

My insight has now become my core belief, this goes in the large middle red circle:

Next, I need to identify the reasons for the core belief. These will become my supporting beliefs. Below is now my current frame of thought:

In order to re-frame the problem, I now need to take one of supporting beliefs and write the opposite in a blue circle:

 I will then continue with a couple variations of each:

I will now repeat for the other supporting beliefs: When doing this, I noticed that I had added conflicting information in one of my supporting beliefs therefore, I left the second part of Discouraged after Applying and Not Getting an Offer off.

 Now I will select the most important opposite belief for each of the supporting beliefs:

Now, if all of these opposite beliefs were true, what would the core belief be? This is my re-framed belief:

Second Weekend of Class - Hypothesis Driven Marketing

     Before getting into the weekend of class, I have to point out that when I did a search of "Hypothesis Driven Marketing" on Google, Star's blog pops up three times on the top 5 posts.

   
     The quote above is quite compelling and brings truth to anyone who has used this process only to come out with facts that counter your strongest initial hypothesis. This is why we use the scientific method and follow it. Our initial ideas about a subject tends to have a strong bias that comes along with it. Using this method will help generate new ideas and also gain confidence around a response to a solution or campaign.
    Over the weekend we went over a large range of topics that surround Hypothesis Driven Marketing.
** My next Blog will cover an example using CACI, Int. We went over what innovation was and what made truly innovative companies. What came out of it was that the most innovative companies even fail but, they keep trying. Using this process allows companies to manage uncertainty when it comes to innovation and product development. Experimentation is a large player in this process. It is important to constantly test and then learn from them in order to move forward. We cannot look at failure as complete failure. Companies need to be comfortable with failure in order to get the rewards of innovations.
     The relationships that have come from science and into this process are the understanding of the problem, the development of several ideas (or hypotheses), coming up with tests, experiments (to test the hypotheses), development (innovation and iteration), then success (decision). The theories that were discussed in class were: Design Thinking (Faste & Kelley); The Lean Start Up (Ries & Eisenmann); Science & Strategy (Lafley & Martin) ; and finally, Business Model Canvas (Osterwalder).
                                  I'm sure everyone remembers this from 7th grade science class:

     Now that we understood the importance of this method, we moved onto the first stage of understanding the problem. Getting outside is a way. Another way of understanding the problem is by re-framing it. We conducted a re-framing exercise in class where we took a problem. My team chose "I hate wearing a purse in the evening". 

Here are some examples of re-frames from the thnk.org website:

     The process that we used for the exercise came from thnk.org. Their step by step process is:

1. Define your core belief - "I hate wearing a purse in the evening"
2. Add supporting beliefs to support your core belief - I have no where to put it, I'm afraid of someone stealing from it, it gets in the way while dancing etc...
3. Find opposites to your supporting beliefs - I can put it anywhere, I am sure that no one will steal from it, it makes it easier to dance etc..
4. Summarize the opposites in a new core belief - This is the statement that the product needs to make; This is something that I want to carry on me all the time.

     

     Next we went over generating possibilities to solve our problem. In this process, the status quo needs to be an option. We also needed to come up with as many solutions as possible, even ones that may not make sense to us at the time. One way to do this is to try and come up with an unrelated object and try to envision this object with the current object. This helps create new connections. Thinking inside the box does this as well. In this process you think of all the existing pieces to the product, describe the characteristics of these components, chose one of the following techniques (Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, Task Unification, and Attribute Dependency), apply the technique to one component or attribute at a time, then decide how this could sell, to whom, and what the benefits are. Another way is using metaphors to describe the features or product and different trigger techniques.

     In class we had to conduct this exercise with our previous problem. Our team had a difficult time coming up with this one as we tried to take an unrelated object that the other two members didn't have a lot of background with (hair clip). We found it is much easier to start with an object that everyone knows about. However, through trial and tribulation, we came up with a clip-on portable pocket.

We imagined something similar to this but could clip to the inside of clothing as well:

     We then moved into the Business Model Canvas. This is where we generated our hypotheses, tested and pivoted our model as needed. 

     In this exercise, we used our 1st hypothesis of the clip-on portable pocket and defined a couple of these areas to help determine if it would hold true and prove valuable. This proved difficult as we had mismatching ideas about how we would market our product and gain revenue. This would be an important feature to use if you planned on going into business with a partner to ensure everyone is on the same page moving forward.

Please look for my next blog on how I used the THNK.ORG's steps for re-framing for the insight I found about CACI.

Listening to CACI Groundswell and Determining an Insight

     Well, now that I am well practiced at working with some social media sites, I am attempting to listen to the groundswell of CACI, Int. in order to come up with a possible insight about the company that I work for in regards to what our target candidates feel about CACI. I'd like to find an insight as to whether I think our company needs to take a look from the outside in on how appealing we are to top talent. I have to say that some of this information may come from some internal groundswell that is not found on an external website.

• To begin I will conduct my search on a couple of sites:

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

CACI Homepage

Google Search - and Images

Wikipedia

• I will use the following words/phrases to start my search and will extend these based off of what is showing up:

CACI
CACI, Int.
CACI Company
Positive CACI
Negative CACI
CACI 2013
CACI Today
CACI History
What do you think about CACI Company

• Results:

     So, I started off with the Google Search. It popped up with the CACI Homepage and then some news articles about newly awarded work followed. Below that was the CACI Wiki page, as expected. The second page listed the LinkedIn account and then the fourth with the Twitter feed. Finally, I found a news article on page four about the company buying a competitor, Six3, for $820M. Reading the article, I found it interesting that it stated that one of the reasons we acquired them was for a contract that was awarded to them this year for $179M out of NGIC. It was interesting because CACI had previously held that contract since inception for over 7 years when Six3 came in and underbid and won it.
     Not finding much more on the name search, I move on. When I look at the images I see a ton of CACI logos mixed in with another skincare company also named CACI. As I scroll down, I start to notice photos of protests of individuals attempting to shut down CACI offices due to an implication of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Yikes! Now, I'm starting to want to move away from this subject since I currently work for CACI. Looking at Wikipedia, CACI has had several lawsuits relating to Abu Ghraib. At the bottom of the page however, it lists CACI in the Top 100 US Federal Contractors (rated at 26).
     Doing a Google search of CACI History brings up Google Finance and a graphic of CACI stock. it seems to be the highest ever at 70.76. Nothing else really comes up from Google with what I have. There is a website called Glassdoor that keeps coming up with employee reviews about the company. I'm going to check that out next.
     Glassdoor, is an interesting site. In the future I may have add this to my Groundswell when looking at a new company. They have a total amount of reviews (208) then stars that go from 1 to 5 (3.4). They rate up to 5 points for Culture & Values, Work/Life Balance, Senior Management, Comp & Benefits and Career Opportunities (3 and higher for all). It shows the current amount that approve of the CEO (68%) and then the percentage of employees that recommend the company to a friend (64%). The information is dated as of 8 November 2013. Some of the reviews are regarding trying to get hired on and trying to get friends hired on. There are other tags I can choose from to review such as overview, salaries, interviews, jobs and more but, I have to have an account to keep reading. Bummer.
     On to Twitter, of course I check out @CACIIntl since that is the tagline for CACI feeds. Of course, the information posted is CACI news that is positive about the company. I'm searching keywords for CACI and positive keywords along with it and nothing is coming up in English so I'm moving on to negative. Still nothing, so I'm going to search for the statements made by some of the protesters to see if anything comes up. So, I finally found something when searching for 'CACI Abu Ghraib'. There is a ton of recent posts with CACI associated with #torture . It appears that CACI sued the prisoners that were made to pose and were abused in the case and won. Now they have to pay CACI $14,000 in legal fees. There seems to be a lot of recent uproar about it it on Twitter but I didn't see it anywhere else yet. Other tweets were about job searching and how to get a job within contracting.
   Now to Facebook. CACI has a Facbook page (https://www.facebook.com/CACIIntl) which is reminiscent of the Twitter feeds and their homepage.  They have 2,380 Likes but there still isn't a dislike button so what does this really even tell you. There are some recent posts by others on the page that bring up the Abu Ghraib news. There are some pretty gruesome photos posted with comments of the company being the worst in the world for suing the victims in the scandal to pay the legal fees. Most everything else are posts about people trying to get a job with CACI. It seems like the website is not intuitive for people trying to get hired on with the company. I'm going to check out the homepage to see what it looks like for trying to get a position.
     In looking at the homepage, it appears that there is a lot of missing information. Some of the comments that I found elsewhere asked a lot about benefits i.e. company, days off/paid time off, amount of tuition reimbursement, referral amounts. The benefits page lists these but it is very generic and does not give you the exact amounts of anything. It's hard to tell what you would really be getting and I cannot find that information anywhere externally. I'm going to look into CACI jobs next.
    Okay, so I clicked on CACI jobs and a search page pops up. It is a list of 960 jobs. I can search by title, JR Number (some may not know what JR stands for), Location and Date (not sure if this is date needed or date posted). What if I was just out of college and was willing to take a number of jobs? There is no where for me to put in my experience and background to see what fits with me. I have to find the position and hope I fit with it. This could really take up a lot of time. I clicked on a position, it doesn't give me a POC, not even a recruiters name. There is no salary range or even date needed by information. The description is a long 30 sentence single paragraph, please kill me now. I'm lucky that I'm not trying to find a job within CACI right now.I can't even tell if some of these positions are the same position or if there are multiple listings for the same job. I'm starting to get frustrated with this system so I am moving on.

• Insight:
  

     If you want to work for CACI, you need to know someone currently working for them.

Using their system is like putting your resume in a bottle and sending it out to sea hoping you threw it in the right direction and that someone along the line will pick it up and notice you.  It is not intuitive and there is no way to get any type of feedback for positions that you have applied to unless you know someone who can look up the information for you that already works there. I'm going to stay away from the Abu Ghraib topic. I don't know enough about the circumstances nor do I have the time to look into that right now. People looking for a job seem to not care about what had happened or have forgotten. Hopefully, this news doesn't get too blown up or there may be a problem on the company's hands.
   

First Weekend of Class - Identifying Insights

      Over the first weekend of the course we discussed identifying insights. We reviewed some techniques to listen to consumers both in person and online. Professor Machin helped us identify what an insight really was and how to define one.

     In one of our exercises to identify insights we used an article on the Smithsonian. We worked as a team to determine what insight the Smithsonian was using to lead their marketing strategy. The insight was
something so obvious that no one had put together yet.

     Another exercise conducted was listening to the groundswell. In this exercise we were assigned as a team, an item from Professor Machin’s bag. Ours happened to me some Clinique
face lotion. We then had to use online resources such as, Twitter, Facebook, Websites, etc… to determine what people feel about the product and identify an insight that could be used to market the product. Our insight was that people wanted free samples to use beauty products in there home because they have allergies and sensitive skin. ** See my next blog on a current example of this using CACI.

     The next exercise was using metaphors to uncover underlying reasons why someone does something. We were handed a bunch of different candies as team. We then needed to identify which candy fit the best costume picture to us. After, we discussed why we chose to pair the particular candy to the picture to identify how were related to the product and what we internally thought about the product.

     We went over techniques to open ended questions that would pull these underlying feelings from individuals about particular experiences and/or products such as: How do you feel about…? and Give me and example…?.

     We discussed protective techniques of questioning that are indirect and encourage people to say their underlying motivations or feelings regarding the item of interest.

     We also looked through a variety of logos. While looking at them we discussed how relevant they were, how we as consumers identified with the brand, and what the company was actually trying to accomplish with their brand.

My favorite picture

     Finally, we went over the Microsoft Office Case. We discussed the insights derived from the research, deep metaphors, shortfalls of the research, and some possible validation techniques to these insights.

     Overall, it was a great weekend. I loved the hands on exercises since we were able to cover so much information while actually using the techniques. I learned how easy it is to listen to the groundswell and how important it is at the same time. It is important to understand why people do the things they do and that usually requires a variety of ways to gather that information. People don’t really know what they want or why they want it and these techniques and help uncover some of those issues so that you understand your market and your product.

Also, I’m using a blog and twitter for the first time and still trying to get the hang of it :) @jemachin

First Blog

So, in looking at the syllabus, we have a choice to write a 15 page paper or blog throughout the course.....

Therefore, I have opened my first blog.

We have just finished the first weekend of class and I am eager to discuss the most recent in-class work we just completed.