The PurPle Index ranks companies on how well they have engaged people around their purpose and initiatives online. Here, we look at four opportunity areas -environment, education, health and human potential. Find out how the Fortune Global 100 companies fare and connect with us to help your brand define its purpose. Visit purple.mslgroup.com

1. PURPLE INDEX
MSLGROUP
How well are the Fortune Global 100
communicating their initiatives and
engaging people around PurPle ?

2. Executive Summary: Purpose, Participation & Performance
MSLGROUP’S PURPLE INDEX: Benchmarking Purpose, Participation & Performance
Background: In 2012, MSLGROUP launched PurPle, a new global offering aimed at helping business leaders drive
positive impacts on the business and society by catalyzing collaborative social innovation and grassroots change
movements. The specialty combines the agency’s CSR, Cause Marketing, Sustainability, Citizenship and Philanthropy
expertise and over 100+ experts around the globe to deliver best-in-class strategy, approaches, ideas and execution
in the broad corporate purpose areas of health, environment, education, and human potential.
PurPle Index: In early 2013, the PurPle team at MSLGROUP embarked on an undertaking to rank the Fortune 100
companies in these purpose areas based on the level of participation/social engagement in their purpose
communications and initiatives. In addition, the team wanted to correlate this level of participation to the
companies’ overall performance and bottom line.
Methodology: Each company was evaluated and scored on a number of aspects including successful storytelling of
their purpose and how engaging the content was on their social networks. Was the content inspiring? Did the
content have a strong call-to-action? Does the company crowd-source, curate and aggregate content on their
platforms?

3. Executive Summary: Purpose, Participation & Performance
Overall Findings: We found that the top performing Fortune global 100 companies use visual storytelling and direct
engagement strategies and tactics to ensure their messaging around citizenship initiatives is amplified. The top
performers consider engagement to be essential in maintaining or changing perceptions about the company. The
citizenship initiatives are global in nature with a number of companies focussing on improving living conditions in
developing regions. The lowest performing Fortune global 100 companies do not recognize the importance of
engagement and do not have a presence on social platforms. Their communication is predominantly one way and used
only to disseminate information.
• Purpose: (1) Wal-Mart, (2) Citigroup, (3) GE, (4) P&G, (5) Toshiba
• Environment: (1) GE, (2) IBM, (3) Toshiba, (4) Honda, (5) BASF
• Education: (1) Wells Fargo, (2) Sony, (3) P&G, (4) ING, (5) HP
• Health (1) GE, (2) CVS Caremark, (3) McKesson, (4) Siemens, (5) P&G
• Human Potential: (1) HP, (2) Siemens, (3) IBM, (4) Toshiba, (5) Citigroup
In addition to a strong and clearly defined Purpose and an effective use of social networks to drive strong participation
in their purpose; when compared to Fortune’s list of Most Profitable Companies 10 (ten) of the top performing
companies on the PurPle Index are also on Fortune's list:
BP, Chevron, Citigroup, Ford, GE, Nestle, P&G, Samsung, Walmart, Wells Fargo. The complete list and best-in-class
PurPle examples can be found in the pages to follow.

4. What is the PurPle Index ?
MSLGROUP’s PurPle offering and a MSLGROUP proprietary tool The Social Hive Index combine to give
us the PurPle Index. The PurPle Index measures relative engagement for global Fortune 100 around
each company’s shared purpose and the four PurPle opportunity areas.

5. The Methodology
The PurPle index uses a combination of automatically updated social data, qualitative research
waves, and our proprietary normalization algorithm to create a single score between 1 and 100.
One time, annual, or quarterly
qualitative research waves on
storytelling and engagement around a
topic.
QUALITATIVE
RESEARCH
SOCIAL DATA PROPRIETARY
ALGORITHM
Proprietary normalization algorithm to
Daily updated social data from
convert social data and qualitative
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Kred, Kl
scores into a single score between 1
out, Peerindex and SEOMoz.
and 100.

6. PurPle Index: Results – Overall Purpose and Individual Themes
Source : Purpleindex.mslgroup.com, Dated 8th February 2012

7. LEADING INITIATIVES DRIVING
ENGAGEMENT
These initiatives drive engagement as stand-alone properties as well as creating content that
engages users on regular social properties of brands.

8. Environment : Platforms, Partnerships and Games
Environmental initiatives directly involving audiences or stakeholders bring greater
engagement on social platforms for the Fortune Global 100. Some examples :
PLATFORMS PARTNERSHIPS CHANGE GAMES
GE Ecomagination, Panasonic Eco-Ideas and Partnering directly with change agents is also Chevron is promoting a energy awareness
Think Blue by VW are co-creation and popular with leading PurPle companies to game Energyville built by The Ecnomist
collaborative social innovation platforms spread awareness or innovate about the Group. This game allows people to
while Nestle Water challenge and Samsung environment. HP partnered Energy star and understand the sources of Eneergy availabl
village are blogs for sharing, solving, ideating Shell partnered Envirofit for grass root level an the multiple emand fators that ome
and discussing environment challenges. change movements. into play for any energy producer.
Image : Ecomagination.com, http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/OnLiberianMedium/message/42115, Energyville.com

9. Education : Teachers, Tech, Partnerships & Awards
Education is supported in multiple ways by the Fortune global 100. The top PurPle initiatives
driving engagement are :
TEACHER ENGAGEMENT TEHNOLOGY ENABLED CLASSROOMS PARTNERSHIPS AND AWARDS
Engaging, providing resources through Bringing modern education to large A popular PurPle initiative is to create direct
platforms and training are some of the audiences supported and pioneered by the partnerships and engage with directly with
leading initiatives for engaging directly with Fortune Global 100. Samsung’s Internet change drivers. This ranges from creating
teachers. Telefonica, Total, BNP Paribas and school program for K-12 countries in Africa financial aid, scholarships to setting up and
BMW have created platforms providing access running schools. Awards, contests and
to educational resources. GE, Nestle and and Panasonic with Kids witness news and competitions are run to unearth, reward and
Exxon provide platforms for teacher training. are examples of such programs. celebrate outstanding students.
Image : Total solar expert, Samsung K-12 schools initiative, P&G Hope schools stats

10. Health : Crowdsourcing, Partnerships and Apps
Health an nutrition related initiatives range from problem identification and idea generation to
partnering NGO’s, vaccination drives and empowering individual healthcare.
CROWSOURCING PARTNERSHIPS MOBILE APPLICATIONS
Co-Creation platforms – These health focused Organisations partner with grass-roots Mobile apps have been built to empower
platforms bring together large audiences or change agents to help improve lives and individuals caring for themselves. Some are
domain thought leaders to discuss living conditions of people. For example built to support off location healthcare to
issues, ideas and create innovations. GE with Walmart has partnered Human Vitality for connect healthcare professionals and
Ecomagination and Siemens Healthworks a healthier food program and P&G has patients. Samsung, Siemens and GE have all
collective are the leading examples. partnered UNICEF for a vaccination drive. launch similar apps.
Image : healthymagination.com, P&G partnership, http://www.mobilechannels.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=453:smartphone-health-apps-big-opportunity-&catid=54:appsbusiness&Itemid=81

11. Human Potential : Incubators, Micro-finance & Knowledge
Supporting and encouraging human enterprise is another area of focus for the leading PurPle
companies in the Fortune global 100. Some key types of initiatives are showcased
INCUBATORS MICRO-FINANCE & PARTNERSHIPS KNOWLEGDE PLATFORMS
Telefonica, BASF and Siemens are all Partnering with Micro-finance institutions A number of the organisations have created
running incubators for science or social to empower grass-roots level knowledge and awareness programs to share
enterprises. These provide some entrepreneurship is a popular human their learning and expertise. Financial
potential initiative. companies are helping people organise
funding, guidance and basic infrastructure Citi, BASF, Chevron, BNP Paribas and Tesco personal finances and make prudent personal
to help innovators and startups. have all created miro-finance financial decisions.
partnerships.
Image : Thenextweb.com, Kiva.com, Grameen foundation logo, Shell Livewire.co.uk

12. Questions:
Scott Beaudoin
917.674.0550
scott.beaudoin@mslgroup.com