A corporate responsibility agenda is nothing without buy-in from the board. In this session, Stephane Quere, board member at Suez, will discuss powerful ideas and techniques to engage the board with your own CR initiatives and agenda.

• What's the best way to get support from your top people?
• Find out the situations where you should not be involving the board
• What does your board need to know before it backs your CR agenda?
• Discover what needs to be done to make CR more appealing to top-level management

Plenty of companies claim to be engaging with local communities. On closer inspection however, this community involvement often turns out to be little more than a series of unconnected philanthropic projects.

• Is it worth doing more than just painting schools?
• Learn the best ways to introduce a more strategic approach to your community involvement
• How has BBVA measured the impact of its activities on the local community?
• Get the facts on the specific results you can expect from engaging in the community at a more advanced, strategic level

Kicking off our series of sessions on CSR measurement is this back-to-basics introduction of an essential aspect of CSR that is all too often overlooked:

• Effective ways to work out what - exactly - you should be measuring
• How to make sense of the results from your CR initiatives
• Do you actually have any evidence you've got any better - even after years of CR?
• Expert tips on the next vital step, when you have tangible results from your CR initiatives

Employee engagement comes up time after time as the most important challenge facing today's CR practitioner. Unless you convince the workforce that a CR initiative is valuable, it's basically dead in the water. But do you know whether you're really succeeding in engaging your employees?

• Hear how to measure the effectiveness of your CR engagement with your workforce
• Think about the correlation between staff turnover and CR communication with employees - and hear the relevant statistics
• See first hand how one of Europe's largest telecommunication companies engages employees world-wide in sustainability practices

Come and hear about the work of three different companies and an NGO in Africa. Exxon, Merck and Chiquita come together and share insight on their work in Africa - has progress been made? What problems have occurred? Does the presence of these companies have a measurably beneficial effect on the local population?

• Get detailed information on the three companies' attempt to make a positive difference to local communities
• How do the companies measure the impact of its actions - and prove the difference it has made?
• In-depth information on Merck, Chiquita and Exxon's initiatives in emerging markets, and how they help local communities
• Insight into ETI work on worker rights in the developing world
• Get practical tools to help you measure the impact of your business in the developing world

In this session we tackle the subject of controversy head on, with BAT, the tobacco company. Mike Nightingale, head of CR at BAT, will talk frankly about the company's experiences of adversity and unpopularity - and offer first-hand advice on how to overcome it.

• Can a company that's accused of being inherently unethical ever hope to have a valid CR agenda?
• Learn more about why BAT is investing in CR so fully
• Has BAT's CR investment affected other areas of their business?

Corporate responsibility has long been a useful way of raising the profile of a company, from cause-related marketing onwards. But is it starting to lose its effectiveness? And has greenwashing eroded consumer trust?

• Step-by-step methods to measure the effectiveness of your CR marketing campaign
• New techniques and strategies to keep your sustainability messages fresh
• An expert guide to the impact of the rise of greenwashing on consumer trust
• Get insight on whether the green marketing boom will end - and if so, when..

The creation of 'CR Champions' is an increasingly popular way to try to engage employees and improve the performance of your CR department. But does this approach actually pay off?

• How do you know your CR Leaders programme is working?
• What are the alternatives to 'CR champions' for effective employee engagement
• How can you guarantee that your CR champions become more successful?

How often have you heard about a CR initiative that's been sunk by a PR campaign that fails to grasp the issues and complexities of the responsible business agenda? A PR campaign that takes the wrong approach can do more harm for your company than the good your CR initiative does. How can you make sure this never happens to you?

• Hear from the experts how the best companies use PR well
• Discover the benefits of getting others to create your communications strategy for you. And the risks.
• The best companies train train train - What kind of sustainability education does your communications department respond to?
• Cock-ups and successes: which companies have got CR & PR right and which have got it badly wrong - and why.

New to CR? There are plenty of small changes that will have a real and immediate effect on your business. Quick, easy solutions to basic CR problems are the focus of this session, and will give you an excellent springboard to move forward and create a fast-track, comprehensive responsible business agenda.

• Find out how to get the basics right and improve performance with the minimum of effort
• Learn more about which are the best practice ideas to achieve quick gains for beginners

Come and hear about the work of the global mining leader in Africa. Anglo-American will share insight on their work on the - has progress been made? What problems have occurred? Does the presence of these companies have a measurably beneficial effect on the local population?

• Get detailed information on the three companies' attempt to make a positive difference to local communities
• How do the companies measure the impact of its actions - and prove the difference it has made?
• In-depth information on Anglo American and Exxon's initiatives in emerging markets, and how they help local communities
• Get practical tools to help you measure the impact of your business in the developing world

Private equity is often assumed to be a natural enemy of corporate responsibility. In fact, many - wrongly - see the move to private as a signal of the end to any real CR activity.

However, Richard Ellis, Head of CR at Boots, takes serious issue with this view.

In this session, you'll hear from Alliance Boots about whether responsible private ownership is actually good for responsible business.

Find out what companies with a wide shareholder base can learn from a private equity owned firm on sustainability

• Innovation: What has private ownership done for new sustainability ideas at Alliance Boots?
• Tips on selling sustainability to the money managers

In this hard-hitting workshop, discover more about how three leading multinationals in three different industries use CSR as a driver for innovation and opportunity. Corporate responsibility has been identified by each of these corporations as a tool to make and save money - it is in this session you will learn strategies to ensure you can do the same.

• How CR has been used to leverage innovation and opportunity at Akzo Nobel, Unilever and Lehman Brothers
• The opportunities you have for creating growth, expansion, new products and improved consumer engagement through corporate responsibility and sustainability

There will be a time when every company engaged in CR will be lambasted by some stakeholders. Any company taking responsible business seriously will attempt to engage these stakeholders and improve the relationship. But should there come a time when your company needs to reconsider the extent of their stakeholder engagement?

• Is it worth working with trenchant critics, or will the effort expended outweigh the potential rewards?
• When the barriers are too great: Can you ever work with people that hate your business?
• The lessons of engagement: key practical tips from top companies who have been in the firing line, and survived

In this session, we will discuss how the multinational corporation can make progress on anti-corruption, and how this progress can be seen to be made:

• How to develop a modern anti-corruption policy and programme
• Tools you can use to counter bribery in their operations
• How can you created a values-based culture throughout the countries in which you operate?

Corporate responsibility must be accepted at every level of an organisation for it to truly become incorporated into their way of doing business.

• Powerful methods to ensure your management team take CR seriously
• Discover how to secure full-blooded commitment from middle management
• Do you need to tailor specific messages to different levels of management - or does one size fit all?

Some companies have found their commitment to Fairtrade has caused them problems recently, whilst others have made a great success of the scheme and are scaling up their operations rapidly.

But what about your company? Can you scale up Fairtrade any more than current capacity?

• Discover whether Fairtrade can ever be a realistic solution to large scale sourcing issues
• Experts discuss the best way to ethically source your products
• Does collaboration with partners in developing markets help or hinder the development of new products?

The vast majority of European businesses have taken tentative steps along the climate-friendly road. Many of them have discovered that climate-based marketing strategies are effective, and in this session you will learn more about how to ensure your own climate marketing works.

• Is sustainability the last great differentiator, after price and quality?
• Guidelines to help you capitalise on the current mania for carbon neutral and climate friendly products and services
• Learn whether your market responds well to green messages
• What sort of results can you expect from a green marketing campaign?
• Professional tips to help you avoid accusations of greenwashing

A familiar demand from NGOs is increased business transparency. But NGOs themselves have faced a recent backlash on their own perceived opacity. So should you be revising the 'rules' when it comes to NGO partnerships?

• Discover why business is demanding greater accountability from NGO partners
• Learn about the risks to your business of working with NGOs that are not transparent
• How do your current partnerships bear up to scrutiny?

In the final session in our series of workshops on embedding CR in your organisation, we look at how best to sell CR to the workforce:

• Find out which employee engagement initiatives have worked particularly well in large companies
• Practical steps to communicate CSR to the workforce and secure maximum engagement
• Should you make CR a personal responsibility and ensure your workforce sees CR on an individual level?
• Strategies to use CSR in staff reviews
• What lessons have Levi Strauss learned while communicating CR to its workforce?

Different markets and different cultures usually add up to different sustainability problems and challenges. This session will discuss whether 'mission statements' and other 'global principles' of business can ever really work in a multinational trading environment.

• Are broad global principles and standards a bad idea?
• Learn how to match universal principles with local adaptation
• How do you work with cultures that are new to you, such as Islamic and emerging economies?

Climate change has been the biggest CR news of 2007 by a clear distance. Companies in every sphere of industry have either chosen or been pressured into acting. The Bali Summit, with a renewed commitment to emission cuts, is only the latest in a year of major developments.

There are many different initiatives in place, from tree planting operations to biofuel development.

The next step is getting results from these initiatives.

• Has your climate change initiative actually had an impact?
• Proven, powerful and effective tools for measuring your progress with climate change
• Expert advice on troubleshooting your climate change initiative