There is not quite a single way of ranking businesses for their social responsibility aspects.
It is in fact difficult to measure the superiority of one activity compared to another, without having a baseline.
Most of the businesses prioritize their social responsibilities depending upon their success in certain areas.
Due to this reason, CSR rankings do not give the exact picture of businesses for social responsibility.
Most of the businesses depend upon a number of best practices in order to manage the intangible aspects associated with social issues.
Some of these practices may be more or less common, but some are innovative in nature, which is a clear indication that some firms have emerged as leaders in CSR.
The following best practices have been actively used by businesses for social responsibility in order to enhance their responsibility activities.
The first is the inclusion of issues in assessing risk models.
Another is to determine a social issue's impact on cost and revenue.
The practices also take advantage from the creativity of internal stakeholders and encourage the formal and informal involvement of external stakeholders.
Businesses also implement value based criteria in order to take decisions and strive to develop social capital in the highest-level management team.
The businesses for social responsibility have been able to integrate social issues in the elements of their organization, rather than keeping them as a completely different issue from the business.
The focus of such organizations is no longer upon developing leadership issues or value statements, but more upon engaging wider group of individuals for discussion and reaching decisions inside and outside the frame of the business.
Such organizations invested substantial time in get people going along with them and started activities, which in the long run would prove to be quite profitable.
There are two positive aspects of businesses for social responsibility.
the first is that they develop diverse perspectives through discussions that may even take a longer time, which ensures that they cover all the risks and create new insights, which assures that their policies, services and products are more innovative and stronger in the market.
And secondly, these businesses are led by minds with visions for long-term benefits from socially responsible projects.
The results of social responsibility actives turn into tangible financial returns only in the long-term.
With long-term horizons, the options for finding innovative opportunities remain open, which for short-term goals would have been rejected outright.