In a new book, Temple professors examine how leaders can assess risk, align values, and decide when to take a public stance on social and political issues.

For leaders at the helm of influential organizations, locally and nationally, deciding when to speak up on social or political issues can be daunting. At a time when politics and social debates increasingly dominate news feeds and shape public opinion, leaders face growing pressure to respond to issues that may directly impact their businesses, employees and communities. 

In a new book, Raising Social Capital: Corporate Advocacy and Impact in a Time of Social Change, Gregg Feistman, professor of practice, and Heather LaMarre, associate professor at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication, examine how organizations can navigate these moments thoughtfully. Drawing on expert interviews and contemporary research, the book offers a decision-making framework to help leaders— from entrepreneurs to senior executives—assess risk, align values and determine whether speaking out serves both their mission and the communities they represent. 

The challenge, the authors argue, is not just deciding what to say but whether to say anything at all. For C-suite executives, taking or avoiding a public stance can shape public trust, influence employee morale and affect long-term support from stakeholders and shareholders alike. 

Below, Feistman and LaMarre discuss how corporate social advocacy has evolved, why leaders feel increased pressure to speak out and how their SpeakIF model helps organizations navigate high-stakes decisions around risk, values and timing. 

Temple Now (TN): Business leaders today face growing pressure to speak out or stay silent on social and political issues. From your research, when did corporate social advocacy emerge as distinct from traditional corporate social responsibility, and why has it become unavoidable at this moment? 

Gregg Feistman: Corporate social responsibility hasn’t disappeared; it’s evolved. What once lived under philanthropy or compliance has shifted into corporate social advocacy in which organizations are expected to explain what they stand for, not just what they do. What makes this moment unavoidable is the environment leaders are operating in. We’re in a polarized, highly connected world where employees, customers, investors and communities are all exerting pressure at once. Silence is often interpreted as a stance. 

As social and political issues grow more complex, the real challenge for leaders isn’t whether to speak up but how to make those decisions strategically rather than reactively. 

Heather LaMarre: I’ve been tracking this since 2010, when Target donated to a gubernatorial candidate who opposed marriage equality. That decision sparked employee activism: employees rallied, organized flash mobs and publicly challenged the company, making it one of the earliest modern examples of employee-led corporate accountability. What stood out to me was how social media opened a new avenue for employees to speak out publicly about corporate political activity that once happened behind closed doors.  

TN: What gap did you see in how organizations were navigating advocacy that led you to write Raising Social Capital? What surprised you most once you started interviewing experts? 

LaMarre: As teachers, we realized there wasn’t a clear set of management tools to help young professionals, or even senior executives, navigate emerging workplace dynamics like employee activism or speaking out on social issues.  

What stood out most from our research were two things. First, we spoke with organizations across industries and sizes, and the only consistent finding was inconsistency. In some places, this work sits in human resources. In others, it’s handled by legal, public relations or marketing and sometimes purely from a branding perspective, bordering on greenwashing. When we asked what environmental, social and governance (ESG) meant to them from a business perspective, it meant something different to everyone, and when something means everything, it ultimately means nothing. 

The most alarming insight came from Wall Street. When I asked investment professionals who sets the metrics for pro-social investing, they told me, “We do.” They’re essentially creating their own scorecards. 

The second major finding was that while large multinationals may have some of this figured out, smaller organizations often don’t. They know the language and want to do the right thing, but they lack the resources and guidance to implement it. That gap is why we’ve seen such strong interest in the book’s management tools. 

TN: A core contribution of the book is the SpeakIF model and your “road map” section. In plain terms, what is SpeakIF, and when should leaders use it? 

Feistman: We developed a proprietary model called the SpeakIF model, and it essentially serves as a checklist. If you have a desire to speak out on an issue, and we’re not advocating that companies or organizations speak out on everything, but there are definite parameters to consider when deciding whether to engage. 

If you do want to speak out on a social or political issue, the model helps leaders determine if this topic is in their wheelhouse. Is this something we should do? Is the timing right, or should we hold off? There are several determining factors built into that process. 

LaMarre: The SpeakIF model can also be viewed as a communication risk-management tool. We include a long-form version in the book that aligns more closely with issue-management cycles, pre- and post-stance-taking checklists, monitoring and follow-up. But the SpeakIF model itself is designed to be a very quick tool, something someone could memorize and complete with a scoring system. 

If you’re being asked in an interview, or someone wants you to go on the record about a topic—for example, if someone asks President Fry, ‘What do you think about this issue?’—it’s meant to be a tool you can run through quickly in your head. If you hit a certain score, the guidance is clear: you should not comment. It’s designed for those hot-seat moments, but it also connects back to the broader, proactive work organizations should already be doing. 

TN: In a moment where backlash can come from customers, investors, employees or online outrage, how should leaders think about timing and risk? And what role do PR and communications professionals play in helping organizations navigate these decisions? 

Feistman: The answer to timing is yes; you can be too early, and you can be too late. Too late is after other players have jumped in. It can come across as ‘me-tooism,’ and your message is going to get lost. Too early? Sometimes you don’t have all the facts. 

And there’s a new challenge: how do you know if the criticism is authentic or not? There was a third party that did an analysis of the criticism of Cracker Barrel’s logo change last year on the X platform and found that more than 45% of it was by bots. So, the question for an organization, a chief communicator or anybody in the C-suite is how do you know if the criticism is authentic? How do you prepare to deal with that? If it’s an algorithm, do you even have to pay attention to it? That’s a tricky one. 

I think one of the roles PR people have is to be the conscience of our organizations and our clients. We’re supposed to have our finger on the pulse of the stakeholders, internal and external. When a CEO comes in and says, ‘I just watched something on CNN last night and I want to do something about this,’ okay—let’s not jump. Let’s investigate. Let’s do our due diligence. Is it appropriate? Is it aligned with what we do? 

It’s perfectly okay to say no if you explain why you’re saying no. Where organizations get into trouble is they change their stance on an issue they have supported, maybe for decades and one day they’re not. And it’s silence that endangers trust. It can’t be ‘go to bed because I told you so.’ You have to explain why you’re either jumping in, pulling back or not taking a stance. 

LaMarre: If you’re doing the right thing for the right reasons, and it’s in your shared values framework with your engaged stakeholders, do you even need to defend it? 

A lot of what we try to do in the road map section is lay out that you shouldn’t be caught by surprise. Reactionary should be 1 out of 10 times. The other nine times, you should have already done the work. 

And a big theme is you can’t run with the political winds. If you’re always chasing what’s popular, you’re never really adhering to core values and your true identity. Companies have multiple identities for different audiences: employees, customers and supply chains. If you don’t understand yourself as an organization and who your audience is, you find yourself in trouble. We’re not anti-marketing, but we do make the argument it has to be deeper than a branding campaign. 

TN: What keeps you passionate about this work and teaching it here at Temple, especially right now? 

Feistman: This new book is not just educating businesses; it’s also educating our students. They’re going into the world, and they’re going to be the change they want to see. We want to plant the seed that this is one of the ways you can make this happen. This applies whether you’re an undergraduate or a graduate student. Take whatever piece of it works for you and pursue that. 

And this isn’t going away. This is like AI. It’s not a fad. As the world gets more connected, and the problems societies face get more complex, everybody’s going to have to deal with it. A lot of organizations know they want to do something, and their intentions are good, and that’s kind of where it stops. So they reach for an ad campaign because that’s tangible. But that’s not what we’re talking about. This has to be cultural. In the long term, it’s going to make you a better organization. 

LaMarre: For me, I’ve been in the classroom for 25 years. I taught through the millennials and through Gen Z, and I’m a mother of two Gen Z kids. For me, this is about a broken promise. Part of the reason we named it Raising Social Capital is because social capital has been lost. Society is fraying. 

Gen Z isn’t having an existential crisis for no reason—everything from the pandemic to AI to affordability. They did everything right. They did their homework, they did the sports, they got the scholarships, they got the college degrees, and they feel like we handed them a broken world with a broken promise. They can’t pay back their loans, they can’t buy houses and they can’t even rent an apartment on their own. There are so many ways we have failed the next generation. 

We have an all-time low trust in media and government and post-pandemic an all-time low trust in science. So for me, this is a call to leaders of organizations—government, nonprofit, for-profit—to understand they do have a responsibility to keep the promises they made to the young people. We have to collectively come together and rebuild social trust. We broke the world, and now we need to fix it. As idealistic as that sounds, it’s what I truly believe.