Although the readership of social reports may still be small, Roger Cowe argues their impact on wider communications is only just being realised.
HBOS, MFI, Sainsbury’s and several other companies have recently been advertising their energy conservation credentials on poster sites around the country. To be precise, it is the Carbon Trust which has been behind the advertising, but the ads feature “Thank you” messages to these companies for working to reduce CO2 emissions.
This kind of approach is certainly likely to grab the public’s attention more than the weighty sustainability reports that such companies produce. Of course these are not alternatives, but it does raise the question of how companies can effectively communicate their social and environmental performance.
Formal reporting tends to be the main focus. Commendably, it has become more formal over the years – more quantified targets and performance measures, more rigorously applied. There is still plenty of room for improvement, even by the leaders, but developments such as the Global Reporting Initiative are setting the direction of things to come in the future.
The result, though, is some very weighty tomes. The Co-operative Bank’s award-winning report runs to nearly 100 pages, for example. The concern is not so much about the trees sacrificed and other resources used – the bank naturally uses 80% recycled paper and in any case distributes many of the reports electronically. The concern is more for the poor readers. Faced with all this information, how many are really able to take it all in. And if the answer is very few, as many people suspect, the next question is about the point of the exercise. In a nutshell, reports which don’t communicate are not worth producing.
The problem is even worse for multinationals faced with the task of communicating performance in each territory as well as globally. For example, Rio Tinto’s website offers 24 separate reports on locations from Anglesey to Zinkgruvan (Sweden, since you were wondering) as well as three dedicated local websites. That is ontop of a comprehensive global review which runs to many, many web pages.
The Rio Tinto global review includes a “Frequently Asked Questions” section – but that doesn’t cover the question frequently asked by companies producing such reviews: “Who reads this stuff?”
That question sometimes provokes despair among those who have laboured to produce what sometimes seems destined only for the bin. But it should not. For a start, this should be the first port of call for all those people who send companies CSR questionnaires. But the important point is that reports such as these should not be intended as mass communication tools. Take the financial analogy. Few people, even investors, seriously read the annual report. But the information it contains is filleted by specialists (financial analysts and others) whose analyses are reflected in the share price and are used by a wider community, while headline information is gathered in indices and league tables for even broader consumption.
Just as a multinational would not expect to use the annual report as a communication medium for local consumers or employees, the same applies to a sustainability report. But it should provide the basic, reliable data which can be used in such communications – and which people can go to if they want more than headline information. In fact CSR should have an advantage over financial information because companies are constrained by the potential share price sensitivity of much financial details.
At the moment, this analogy falls down because the processes for filtering the mass of corporate data are not at all well-developed. But that is changing. The BITC Corporate Responsibility Index is a start. Rating agencies are also making serious headway on corporate responsibility.
There will never be a CSR mechanism to match share prices – which quickly reflect new performance information. But the tools are being developed to use the raw data and to feed broader communications channels, even if poster ads remain a rare example of mass CSR communications.
Roger Cowe is a freelance journalist, writing regularly for the Financial Times, The Guardian and other leading journals
Corporate Citizenship Briefing, issue no: 69 – May, 2003
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