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Although company engagement is highly context-specific, you can leverage several strategies to help establish contact and ensure that companies engage with your findings. Ultimately, the choice of whether and when to engage with a company is entirely yours, and may depend on your goals and knowledge about existing power dynamics.
With that said, the following guidelines based on our experience may prove useful to develop your own advocacy strategy.
What you’ll find
When you engage with a company, you should use every resource at your disposal to find the people who are most likely to respond. Reporting structures are often indecipherable externally (and even internally!), but you can use LinkedIn, companies’ blogs, and their social media presence to identify potential contacts. In addition, pay attention to any emails and author names that appear in major reports (e.g., sustainability reports). If possible, create a bank of contacts.
Formulate a basic plan for whether you want to signal the existence of study to the companies before, during, or after the research. RDR’s experience indicates that it pays to conduct exploratory outreach as soon as you know the scope, company selection, and timeframe of your research. RDR itself conducts outreach to companies that are new to the process at an exploratory stage of the research process to familiarize them with the methodology. Emphasize that the substance of both your calls and their feedback is confidential. If you manage to schedule a call with a company (either during the research process or once you’ve completed it), prepare some highlights in advance, as it’s easy to get lost in a research input sheet. If companies provide feedback on individual indicators that you find to be insufficient enough to warrant improvement, write up a short internal explanation that you can refer to should the company inquire about it. Finally, you can remind the company that RDR’s process and resulting data have gained strong support among investors, many of whom use them to gauge the risks of investing (or remaining invested) in a company. The emergence and slow consolidation of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) metrics in this community has already pushed most major companies around the world to start issuing custom ESG reports. Because RDR provides a well-known digital rights gold standard for measuring company performance in these areas, the results are valuable from an ESG and reputational perspective.
In some cases, RDR already has an open line of communication with a given company and can try to facilitate a connection, or at least make our liaisons aware of your project. But across regions and contexts, different approaches may work better. Companies that are new to this research process should be made to understand that this is a structured, established, battle-tested approach that many of their peers willingly engage with to improve their own policies and practices.
RDR talks to companies throughout the research process, building in a stage at which they receive a comprehensive set of preliminary findings in the form of a structured dataset. The companies can then comment on those findings, contribute additional sources, and argue for score improvements based on combinations of sources. Whether you want to integrate this step into your work might depend, but RDR’s experience shows that this step is empirically useful and generates dialogue effectively.
Companies publish annual reports, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and sustainability reports, and other similar overviews. Many rely on widely used frameworks and benchmarks such as SASB, GRI, CHRB, and Sustainalytics. They also regularly use the framing of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Explore these sources with a special eye toward the metrics the companies you’re evaluating use and then determine how your own evaluation differs from these other frameworks. RDR’s indicator ecosystem specifically focuses on digital rights and is generally more granular than others. This makes it necessary to ask more specific questions. Using existing framing is also useful because companies’ Corporate Social Responsibility and ESG teams are often intimately familiar with these benchmarks, which means you’re bringing them into known territory.
Companies pay close attention to how they compare to their closest peers, whether they offer similar services or they operate in the same country (often both). Once you have a set of preliminary results, make sure you know where a company does better or worse than its competitors before you initiate a conversation.
There are two crucial scenarios to identify: 1) When one company publishes a key resource or commitment that another does not (e.g., a human rights commitment or a transparency report), and, 2) When one company is an outlier in how poorly they perform on a given indicator or set of indicators.
Both scenarios create an opening to underscore how the company risks falling behind its peers. When engaging with telcos that operate subsidiaries in multiple markets you are analyzing, map those markets out and take note of those where two companies overlap the most. Being aware of these overlaps can be a powerful tool, including as a resource to query during conversations.
In fact, by familiarizing yourself with a range of their policies, you might end up with a stronger overall understanding of a company than they do of themselves. Many companies are rife with faulty internal feedback loops, under-resourced teams, and weak holistic understanding of the sources they themselves publish, let alone how they compare with their competitors. A chilling effect and skewed power dynamics can take hold when we assume that companies have perfect information. Your evaluation gives them an opportunity to correct course when their policies and practices are found to be lacking. You are essentially independent auditors. Your research scrutinizes and assesses them, but also informs them of the gaps they need to target. In other words, do not feel intimidated.
It’s very likely that colleagues and peers from other organizations have attempted to engage with the same companies, or with other actors from the same sector/industry. Consider taking the time to find out if there are other civil society organizations that have already tried to interact with the companies to improve their policies and practices. This includes those who don’t work on digital rights, such as environmental groups, educational advocates, or even labor unions. Learning about their experiences in advance can be an asset for your advocacy strategy.
Once the data collection process is complete, you’ve processed the results and you’ve assigned scores, you may be thinking of engaging with various actors as part of the strategy you designed at the beginning of the project. Some of the objectives you have set for your project may include using the research findings to influence policy decisions, using them to recommend specific actions to address salient issues, or to raise awareness among the public about how companies are operating.
In the Prepare section, we talked about the stakeholder mapping exercise, in order to identify who needs to be engaged throughout the life of the project. Think of the data you collected, and your analysis of the data, as a means to an end, a specific tool to achieve your objectives, not an end in and of itself.
Now is the time to think about the specific actions you need to take to engage each stakeholder.Some of the questions you should ask yourself include:
Some online services may be useful for finding relevant people. You can also use the “About” pages of companies, organizations or public bodies, and even social media platforms such as LinkedIn (especially if you want to become familiar with the personnel structure).
Before you share the findings with journalists, civil society organizations, public officials, regulators, and company representatives, customize the specific message that you want to highlight from your research. A strong advocacy strategy should involve catering your objectives to individual actors, which will guide the format and content of your messages.
In the case of a regulator or a policymaker, it would be counterproductive to share a full report, given that they are usually working on many issues at any given time. You want to capture their attention quickly, pointing them directly to the problem, why they should care about it, and what they can do about it. To achieve that, think about answering these questions in one or two pages, at most. Many researchers and advocates prepare an Executive Summary or Key Findings document for this purpose.
Partnering with other organizations, advocacy groups, and experts can help bolster your engagement strategy, diversifying roles and showing a united front combating, together, the problems highlighted by your research.
In our case, we partner with organizations like Access Now to continue pressuring companies after the publication of our rankings. In May 2019, June 2021, and September 2022, Access sent a letter to the leaders of the 26 ranked companies, urging them to review their performance in our rankings and provide a public response. Access customized every letter asking each company for at least one timely and achievable improvement, raising issues such as increasing transparency and conducting human rights due diligence.
Thanks to this campaign, RDR’s research is being used by an advocacy-focused organization, companies are being directly invited to respond to our findings publicly, and our main goal–companies improving their policies and practices–is being advanced.
We also work directly with investors engaging with ranked companies through coalitions, such as the Investor Alliance for Human Rights, and support human rights-focused shareholder resolutions.
