Whether you’re focused on cause marketing, purpose-driven marketing, corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, social impact, social good or shared value, the lingo very quickly starts to overlap when it comes to describing businesses doing well by doing good.
Here are some excellent corporate social impact resources that help us define all of these terms:
Cause Marketing Glossary
Probably the most comprehensive list you’ll find comes from For Momentum (and also requires you to enter your email – it’s worth it!) and contains 250 cause marketing and social impact industry terms. They cover all the must-have terms like “Commercial Co-Venture”, “Halo Effect” and “Slacktivism”.
Cause Marketing Glossary: Every Term You Need to Know
This resource from Global Giving shares 76 terms in the cause marketing and social impact space as well as an “10 Cause Marketing Terms You Need To Know” infographic resource. Terms range from “Authenticity” to “GivingTuesday” and is an easily digestible resource if you don’t want to wade through the longer lists.
Glossary of CSR Terms
This robust list of CSR-specific terms from Satell Institute provides definitions for 84 terms that lean toward more traditional corporate social responsibility language from academia and include terms like, “Trusteeship Model”, “Signaling” and “Fourth Sector”.
Glossary of Corporate Social Responsibility Terms
This list from CSR Matters contains 48 terms that contain a wide variety of terms from cause marketing to peer-to-peer giving, many going deep into the weeds of employee engagement lingo. Unique terms defined include, “fund-catching” and “equivalency determination”.
A Quick Guide To Social Change Buzzwords And Terminology
From SocialGoodStuff, this list of 21 terms is a bit more niche-focused and leans more toward social innovation/shared value and includes terms like, “social return on investment”, “social enterprise” and “effective altruism”.
