Plant based Electricity..Imagine that..

Today's topic would be: Renewable Energy

Sustainability often talked about innovation to Renewable Energy, 
But this not so new technology of Plant based Electricity is perhaps one of the innovation that seems not being response aggressively by the world. Me in Indonesia, just find out about this great innovation this year of 2013 from a local magazine, name Tempo in their published magazine December edition.

It is very surprisingly odd for me that not many company or industry willing to try to use this technology, is because the cost? which in my logic would not be higher than solar cell technology..but perhaps I am wrong, or is it because it is one of innovation that could provide cheap energy with minimum impact to environment.

It is interesting for me because then my thinking was that, perhaps the reason is because many other industry would be affected from this new technology, many would not use their product anymore..etc..etc..my skeptic thinking that there is a movement in global to prevent this kind of technology to be socialized or at least not to be implement..

But just imagine if this is true, would it be as simple as having a park with their own power source for the park lamp or street light, or for plantation or community who lived in green village such as many in my country..can we imagine how many energy saved from that new technology, how many budget can be allocated to other purpose such as empowerment.

for those who doesn't know it yet, please find below article from www.plant-e.com 

Technology

Plant-e develops products in which living plants generate electricity. These products are based technology that was developed at Wageningen University, which was patented in 2007. The patent is now held by Plant-e. The technology enables us to produce electricity from living plants at practically every site where plants can grow. The technology is based on natural processes and doesn’t harm the plant or its environment.

Via photosynthesis a plant produces organic matter. Part of this organic matter is used for plant-growth, but a large part can’t be used by the plant and is excreted into the soil via the roots. Around the roots naturally occuring micro-organisms break down the organic compounds to gain energy from. In this process, electrons are released as a waste product. By providing an electrode for the micro-organisms to donate their electrons to, the electrons can be harvested as electricity. Research has shown that plant-growth isn’t compromised by harvesting electricity, so plants keep on growing while electricity is concurrently produced.

Stakeholder Satisfaction Survey

Today's topic would be: Stakeholder Satisfaction Survey

More and more companies are now implementing CSR program, or CSV, but not much understand how to measure your stakeholder satisfaction, measuring your CSR program performance, in form of an index or score that is easier to understand rather than a long narrative write up about qualitative review of each program performance.

As many service industry use Importance Performance Analysis (IPA), any other company can also use the same analysis to measure their social responsibility program. The four quadrant resulted from the analysis will help management review the program implementation whether is match the stakeholder expectation, over doing or not match at all.

Untuk teman-teman yang ada di Indonesia, dan tertarik lebih jauh untuk mengetahui survey kepuasan masyarakat atau stakeholder bisa langsung menghubungi saya di missluki@live.com atau wardhani.lukita@gmail.com. 

This year, we are trying to expand our experience not only for sharing our insight but also to assist those who are in need of social survey, assessment, analysis, or even developing CSR program plan.

We are welcoming anyone who is interested to utilize our assistance related to Indonesian Sustainability context.

cheers.. and happy holiday..

Measuring your Stakeholder Satisfaction Index

Today's topic would be: How to Measuring your Stakeholder Satisfaction Index

Before we talked about how to measure the stakeholder satisfaction to our CSR Program, I would like to raise an issue that sometime most company forgot about. A corporate who implemented CSR programs sometime forgot that they actually need someone to manage two role and function of that CSR. One is the program executor, or most common called by Community Development Officer and the other one is the program controller, this is the one that sometime been forgot by most company. The role of the CSR program controller is can be as limited as just to control the program implementation, ensuring that the program is match to their target performance, budget and schedule. But can also as wide as from strategic planning, budgeting to monitoring and evaluation of the CSR program.

That way, your CSR would have a balance function, a role who is executing the program and a role of strategically control the program. This way, it is easier for the corporate to measure their own CSR performance, to analyze their works, their CSR programs and their branding position in public view or in their stakeholder perspective.

Ending up with no one evaluate the performance, this would led to uncertainty that we achieved our objective or not, we just implemented but no one seems to evaluate the impact or the perspective of our stakeholder regarding our works.

So, question is how to measure your stakeholder satisfaction?
First of course, you need to understand who are listed in your stakeholder list. What is the main group of your key stakeholder..is it the customer? the employee? the vendor? the principal? the share holder? the owner? or the government? (please refer to stakeholder mapping)

If you have identified your stakeholder then you can set a regular period of time to do a performance survey against all your CSR program and your brand image to those targeted stakeholder group.

It can be a simple survey of series of questions to explore your stakeholder opinion regarding the brand, the programs on various of element such as Satisfaction rate, Importance rate, Beneficial rate, Sustainability, etc..

To score can be limited as 1 to 4 or 1 to 5, the important is to analyze with the tools match to your company need. If you need to identify the satisfaction rate only of each your program implementation, the common one is to use Importance Performance Analysis (IPA) where the result can be shows in a cartesius diagram such as below

From the IPA you can identified which program is already in good work or match the satisfaction of your stakeholder, which one require an improvement because its overkill (high performance but low importance) or "concentrate here" quadrant (highly importance but least performance).

Various people has also tried to propose a tool to measure the total performance based on stakeholder perspective, such as an analysis of Business Process performance against four group of stakeholder; Customer, Employee, Owner and Supplier as below

as it is written in http://www.bptrends.com/publicationfiles/04-06-WP-StakeholderAnalysis-Curtice.pdf

Some even create their own performance analysis, so how about yours?

How do you measure the performance of your stakeholder perspective against your company performance?