Do stakeholders notice or care when top executives focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Although stakeholders overwhelmingly express personal interest in socially responsible policies, they are inundated on a daily basis with a wide array of information and have been shown to focus little attention on a firm’s guiding logics. We draw from activation theories to argue that situationally-relevant, visible, and accessible activation triggers are needed to induce stakeholder responses. We develop frameworks for understanding both trigger emergence and different types of triggers. Analyzing thousands of earnings call transcripts, market-to-book ratios, social media posts, charitable donations, political contexts, and millions of Glassdoor.com employee ratings for S&P1500 firms over 13 years, we also find that neither shareholders nor employees significantly react to a firm’s attention toward a CSR logic. However, we do identify a range of triggers that activate employee and/or shareholder responses. Triggers emerge from individual, firm, industry, and institutional levels of analysis, from internal and external sources, involve both dispassionate and emotionally-charged information, and from both critical events and continuous information flows. In doing so, we provide a framework for both managers and scholars to better understand when stakeholders will react to a firm’s embrace of new institutional logics.