Stakeholder Engagement

Few companies have as devoted a following as The Walt Disney Company. And even fewer are as heavily scrutinized as Disney. While complete consensus among all the divergent stakeholder interests is probably an impossible outcome, we seek to achieve transparency, so that stakeholders can understand our actions and our intentions. The company also believes that working with stakeholders enhances its ability to address impacts and contribute solutions to some of today's most important challenges while generating value for shareholders.

The Disney enterprise is a broad range of businesses that spans multiple technology platforms and different global markets. When it comes to Corporate Responsibility, we take a broad view of potential stakeholders, including people or organizations that can affect, or be affected by, Disney. This includes employees, consumers, communities, shareholders, distributors, licensees, suppliers, retailers, contract workers, nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, media and governmental organizations.

Recent Engagements

We engage with stakeholders routinely and in a variety of ways, including in-person and Web-based meetings, conference calls, correspondence, working groups and workshops, and conferences and events. Frequently this engagement focuses on projects of joint interest.

One example has been our work with Project Kaleidoscope. During this multiyear project, Disney collaborated with McDonald's Corporation and a group of investor organizations on a common objective to improve conditions in factories. The project aimed to create internal systems that rely on enhanced training and education for management, supervisors and factory workers along with positive compliance incentives to supplement the traditional audit-focused compliance processes. Results of the project released in 2008 indicate that the approach is a viable one.

At our parks and resorts, we routinely conduct surveys among Cast Members, nonprofit and community leaders, government officials and the general public in the United States, France and Hong Kong in order to gain insight into issues of concern to our stakeholders. Results from these surveys help inform business choices.

In developing our environmental strategies, we've worked with Conservation International (CI), a well-known nongovernmental organization. In 2007, CI hosted a comprehensive education session for Disney's Environmental Council3, giving members a solid understanding of pivotal environmental issues, how corporate America and the U.S. government have responded to those issues, and a recommended direction for Disney's environmental strategy. This collaboration led to the development of a comprehensive and focused long-term environmental strategy for the company.

In developing this comprehensive report, we engaged selected stakeholders in a dialogue around the content and our process. As part of the process we had one in-person meeting with these stakeholders to review a rough draft of the report and several follow-up phone calls to clarify additional comments. These stakeholders have broad industry experience and provided invaluable external perspective on how and what we should include in the report.

Going Forward

While engagement around this report represents an important step for transparency and accountability at Disney, we are looking forward to increasing the dialogue with a broader group of stakeholders in the coming years as we continue to identify, prioritize and address key responsibility issues for the company.

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