ESPN, Discovery Education, Ketchum among the winners in Corporate Social Responsibility awards

From campaigns around carbon neutrality and mental illness to road safety and transgender rights, this year’s winning organizations in PR Daily’s 2020 Corporate Social Responsibility Awards have a lot to take pride in.

More than 20 organizations were lauded as the best of the best.

Standing out from the impressive crowd are two Grand Prize winners. Kevin Martinez of ESPN is this year’s CSR Professional of the Year. As VP of corporate citizenship, he exceeded his 2020 goal of enabling 1 million kids’ access to sports by reaching 1.7 million by the end of 2019. Under Martinez, ESPN enhanced its relationships with sports leagues, sponsors and other business partners. ESPN has also built or refurbished 81 play spaces in underserved communities worldwide, and provided 219,000 coaches with training in an effort to remove the barriers to accessing sports.

Our second Grand Prize winner is Panda Restaurant Group for CSR Campaign of the Year. As part of its “Round Up” campaign, the restaurant chain asked customers to round up the cost of their order to the next dollar. Those small increments added up to millions of dollars for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals and its educational charities. In 2019, Panda Express raised $51.4 million for its charity partners through its in-store fundraising program.