BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: For the millions of American stockholders, among them many faith groups, there is conventional investing—trying to get the highest return on your money—and there is so-called socially responsible investing—trying to do well and also do good. Once, religious and other concerned investors divested from companies that engaged in certain practices such as doing business in apartheid South Africa. Now, more and more, and with strong leadership from faith groups, the emphasis is on persuasion. Billions of dollars are involved, and the pressure does not seem to hurt the bottom line. Betty Rollin reports.

MERCY INVESTMENT GROUP (praying): Fill us with love and devotion. Holy wisdom, guide us in the choices we must make.

BETTY ROLLIN: Choices like what to do with $400 million. This is a board meeting of the Mercy Investment Program, which manages investments, chiefly pensions, of the Sisters of Mercy. They are an international community of nuns who focus on issues of poverty, women, and children.

MARY GRADY DUDEN (Mercy Investment Program): Religion is a lived life. It's not just about going to church on Sunday or Saturday. It's how do you take what you believe and use it for the greater good.

ROLLIN: For this group the greater good is getting companies to be socially responsible.

Father MICHAEL CROSBY (Mercy Investment Program): When you own equities or common stock in companies, generally speaking it gives you ownership, and as an owner you have a voice.

ROLLIN: But is doing good bad for business?

Fr. CROSBY: There is no loss by doing good, by doing the kind of things that we do. We have as good of returns as those who are not using socially responsible screens.

ROLLIN: The Mercy investors' voice is one of 275 mostly religious groups, all members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, known as the ICCR. Their investments total $110 billion.

Tim Smith, a Methodist minister, was a founder of ICCR and led the group for many years.

TIM SMITH (Walden Asset Management): You see more and more companies being willing to take stands on corporate social responsible issues—to say we're going to be a leader on climate change; we're going to be committed to a strong position on diversity; we are going to make sure that our products are not made in sweatshops overseas as much as we possibly can.

ROLLIN: Journalist Marc Gunther has written extensively on this issue.

MARC GUNTHER (Journalist, Fortune Magazine): I think in the beginning there was moralizing and preaching and, understandably, passion over issues like apartheid and the Vietnam War. There is still passion, but now it is grounded in much more of an economic argument and therefore more likely to be effective.

ROLLIN: A priority issue both for religious communities and the Coca-Cola Company has been the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa.

MARC PREISINGER (Shareholders Affairs Manager, Coca-Cola Company): HIV/AIDS is not a social issue for us. We're the second largest private sector employer on the continent of Africa, and so we find ourselves in some cases having to hire two, three different people for the same position because of the amount of sickness involved. So it's a business issue.

ROLLIN: The Coca-Cola Company has provided enormous help for people with HIV/AIDS. ICCR urged them to report on their efforts.

Mr. PREISINGER: We had no intention of reporting and in fact didn't think it was a good idea at the time. But they convinced us that in fact it was. And we not only got quite a good if you will publicity rub out of it, we believe we were helpful to other companies who were struggling with what to do on that issue on the continent.

ROLLIN: Sister Valerie Heinonen flies around the country meeting with executives and attending annual shareholders meetings. She's been pestering companies for years.

Sister VALERIE HEINONEN, OSU (Corporate Social Responsibility Consultant): Most often the first conversation is polite, but we may not necessarily have anyone at the table who believes that it's necessary for them to go any further than to listen to us.

ROLLIN: How do you get them to move?

Sr. VALERIE: Persistence.