What are sustainability reports for? Who are they for? Easy! It’s all about transparency, storytelling, stakeholders, investors… you know the drill. But ask the question ‘where’s the value’- and the answers are harder to find.

Who knows where the money goes?

There’s something strange going on. Despite huge growth in sustainability reporting in recent years – printed A4s, PDFs, and a dazzling range of formats from micro-sites to videos to commemorative mouse mats – the return on all that money spent still seems to be a matter of anecdote and…wishful thinking. Hardly anyone wants to share what they know – or don’t know - about impact, except with a wry grin and much harrumphing. This is odd.

As the big CSR and sustainability teams melt into the mainstream of their host companies and their budgets decline, reporting remains an area of significant resource allocation – time and money – for CSOs and their like. Millions of dollars are being spent corralling the data, aligning with GRI, beating up internal stakeholders to produce copy and hiring designers and digital strategists.  But when the stats come in, it turns out hardly anyone has looked at the output and nothing seems to happen.

The reporting treadmill

I think this reluctance to question the value is because reporting is both a treadmill that’s hard to get off, and an industry where it’s in nobody’s interest to point out that the impact is not proportionate to the investment. And hands up, having worked at a specialist reporting agency, I’ve been a part of that industry. “Surely you’re not still doing a boring old PDF? Your report is full of red-hot sizzling content, and if you want to make the most of it, what you need is a micro-site, a concertina, an animation, real time data feeds, social media mavens working 24/7; fact sheets, quarterly updates, translations, a crowd-sourced sentiment analyzer and a user customizable dashboard!”

And yet a quick look at those expensive videos on YouTube with 47 views in as many months made me wonder about the return. Would the money have been better spent elsewhere?  –Is the often widespread view that reporting was mainly an expensive and time-consuming excuse for not doing anything - actually right? I wondered even more after joining a recent webinar about reporting and feeling about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit when I raised the issue. “We’re not going back to that old chestnut about nobody reading reports are we?” complained one consultant. Well, sorry, but yes we are.

If reports can change the world without anyone reading them, to return to the original question, where exactly is the value?

Finding the value

In my experience, value comes in two places.

• Communications: The first kind of value is the impact of reports on ‘readers’ – the kind of impact we traditionally think of with reporting - and here there are two types of reader with different needs.
  - One is the specialist stakeholders that really need to know about performance, risk, strategy or whatever other aspect of the business that floats their boat. They could be customers, or investors, or regulators, or NGOs. They matter, but in the main they are a professional readership that wants to get to specifics quite quickly and often they are a bit annoyed about having to wade through stories about Doreen in procurement and her passion for dolphins.
  - A second, but generally larger group is employees, who want to feel they work for a company with a conscience and a purpose (especially if they are millennials). The mix of the big picture and the stories that prove it help them identify with the business. And here I think it is worth thinking about multimedia approaches to connect with them.
• The Reporting process: This second type of value is not about the comms that pop out at the end, but the often arduous business of getting the data, the content, the story together.  Painful though it may be, it’s one of the most regular and consistent efforts to connect sustainability to the business that many companies make, and in my view it’s often neglected as a means of building culture and buy-in.

Making more of reporting

The interesting thing about these two types of value is that they can operate quite independently of each other. Lots of nice looking reports are produced and presumably satisfy some readers without having connected much to people in the business. Reporting processes that are so ingrained in culture and business practice that pushing out a report becomes a simple matter are less common. Having started reporting, it’s very difficult to stop, so I believe it’s in the integration of the process and the comms that the future lies.

If you want to create change, using reporting to promote new ways of working, and being highly pragmatic about getting a return on the investment is the first step to better value and an easier life!

If that hasn’t put you off entirely and you want to find out more about how Anthesis can help you find the value in your sustainability reporting see our flyer or drop Ben a line at Ben.Tuxworth@anthesisgroup.com.