Assessing Social Impact of Sport-Industry Philanthropy and CSR

This chapter aims to explain how sports organizations can assess the impact of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives on society, or social impact. To achieve this end, the chapter starts by pointing out the growing importance of evaluating social impact for companies including sports organizations. This is followed by the discussion of the uniqueness of sports organizations in terms of their potential to implement a highly impactful CSR program. Moreover, in order to address the lack of agreement about what the term “social impact” entails, this chapter proposes a framework of the social impact of CSR initiatives (“CSR impact”) based on existing literature. More specifically, along the two dimensions, the unit of analysis dimension and the timing of impact dimension, this framework classifies CSR impact into four types: (1) intermediate individual impact, (2) intermediate community impact, (3) long-term individual impact, and (4) long-term community impact. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to provide a detailed explanation of each type of CSR impact through a case study of the “Get Fit with the Grizzlies” program launched by the Memphis Grizzlies in 2006. This chapter concludes with suggestions on how sport executives overseeing CSR programs can perform the assessment of the programs’ social impact based on the developed framework.