What next for CR reporting?

April 18, 2007

In the wake of Vodafone’s success in the ACCA reporting awards, Charlotte Grezo argues that good, creative reports are a real chance to communicate the impact of CR.

How many corporate responsibility reports do you actually read each year and how many if any, do you look forward to reading each year? (Apart from your own company’s of course!)

The annual corporate responsibility report has become a routine for most large companies across the world and for many it is now just a ‘tick in the box’ part of the annual sustainability programme. On occasion their creativity and passion is focused on programme delivery, rather than the reports themselves; so many are complex, accountability-based documents that turn off anyone other than the most dedicated reader.

However, as such a core part of CR activity, good, creative reports are a real chance to communicate the impact of corporate responsibility to a wider audience as well as an important tool to extend existing stakeholder engagement programmes.

We were delighted when Vodafone was awarded the ACCA award for best CR report in 2006 earlier this month. However, rather than the win itself, it was the judges’ comments on the report’s simplicity, readable nature and candid approach that really pleased us. We believe it is key that the corporate responsibility report breaks down barriers between ourselves and our stakeholders through clear, inclusive communications.

Stakeholder engagement

The average reader takes less than seven minutes to skim through a corporate responsibility report and, while SRI and bench-markers will scrutinise it in depth, many important stakeholders will be in that seven minute group. So how do you keep them interested even for that long and encourage them to keep reading for longer?

The answer is that it is not easy and we are constantly on the look out for ways we can improve. Significant factors that we feel have helped to date have been limiting the content to a 40 page report and going back to the simplest elements of reporting. This approach is to state what we said we would do, how we have done it and what we will do next. This style helps external parties monitor our progress and has an added benefit through the year of keeping an internal culture of achieving targets.

Alongside our simple style, we have structured our corporate responsibility reporting around the issues our stakeholders tell us are most important, thereby addressing their concerns directly. As opposed to reporting our work project by project we use this to keep the reader’s interest beyond Vodafone, balancing our role and work on the real issues in the world around us. Publishing eleven local reports (two thirds of our markets) in addition to the global report also helps focus on the real issues affecting our stakeholders. In the 40 page report we produce there isn’t room for everything so we select the issues by level of concern and interest of stakeholders most affected by our operations, our impact on society and environment and the financial and reputational impact of our business.

Innovative communication

Corporate responsibility reporting is an ongoing communications activity and we recognise that the publication of an annual report is only part of the story. We have therefore developed a complementary initiative to help build a more in-depth communications programme with our stakeholders: the Vodafone CR Dialogues.

While the report identifies our most material issues, the Dialogues provide an opportunity to explore subjects in depth from different perspectives. The Dialogues’ process includes asking a third party to write a detailed paper on a particular issue, holding a stakeholder engagement event with experts on that issue, and then publishing both the stakeholders’ views and our views for wider discussion. The Dialogues have helped animate the debate around the issues we deal with and, we hope, led to our CR reporting then having a greater resonance with our stakeholder audiences.

Improving standards

Developing corporate responsibility reports should be a chance for shared learning and help us improve the level of responsibility taken by corporates. Sharing detailed information in the public domain ideally would and should lead to interaction with sector colleagues and competitors so we can build on our work and share learnings.

Assurance in reporting clearly helps improve standards and we are committed to using an established accreditation to help benchmark our work. At Vodafone we work closely with Deloitte, which provides an external voice to challenge and confront us on our reporting so that we can be as transparent, material, complete and responsive as possible. The assurance of our reports has made the final product more unbiased and factual, through the auditors challenging the assumptions of the issue owners.

Ultimately corporate responsibility reporting is a way in which to provide transparent information to stakeholders and build trust. As well as what you report, how you report and looking at new ways in which to report is vital in improving engagement with stakeholders. This needs to be balanced with the reality of the work you do, what you do to engage, listen and respond to stakeholders; the real meaning of corporate responsibility is demonstrated by the work that is done to ensure the business acts in an ethical and sustainable manner

Vodafone Group won best report at the ACCA UK Awards for Sustainability Reporting 2006. For more information about Vodafone Corporate Responsibility visit: www.vodafone.com/responsibility and for more information on the Vodafone CR Dialogues visit: www.vodafone.com/responsibility/dialogues

Dr Charlotte Grezo is Trustee of the Vodafone Group Foundation and Vodafone Group’s Director of Corporate Responsibility. Grezo joined Vodafone in January 2001 from BP, where she was Director
of Global Environmental Issues.

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