Sustainable development reports are fundamentally different from other forms of corporate reporting in that they deal with the performance of a company or organisation in three key areas – environmental, social and financial. Furthermore, sustainability reporting demands that the information presented is integrated to provide a much more complete picture of an organisation’s performance and impacts than standalone financial, environmental and/or social reports.
It requires a fundamental and strategic shift in the way a business is conducted, managed, sets targets and measures itself. It throws the traditional concepts of ‘success” out the window, and demands that a balance be achieved in the three key performance areas. This is a lot more difficult than making a healthy profit and then doing your best not to harm the environment or people in the process.
Therefore, the paradigm shift must take place within an organisation before questions of data collection and reporting arise. You can’t gather some data and produce a sustainability report before your organisation has embraced the concept of sustainability.
Or you can, but then that’s just window dressing.
Environmental consultant Arend Hoogevorst hits the nail on the head when he says: ‘Perhaps the most important part of sustainability reporting is buy-in – from the MD, management, contributors and stakeholders.”
With that as a starting point, companies can enter the exciting world of sustainability reporting with enthusiasm — and creativity. It is a new field, social and environmental accounting disciplines are still in their infancy, the sky is the limit.
The Global Reporting Initiative guidelines provide you with a roadmap as to what information is required, and how to compile it. It is common sense, not rocket science.
Communicate
The first question to ask when preparing your sustainability report is, who is the target readership?
If you are producing a report for a well-informed environmental watchdog committee, or a group of no-nonsense shareholders, you can present a lot of technical information in compact form. You can assume they already know a lot about your business, so you can dispense with the frills and cut to the chase: hard information presented in tables and graphs with short, to-the-point explanations where absolutely necessary.
If on the other hand you are communicating with members of your local community who do not necessarily have knowledge about the industry you’re in, and who probably don’t have a lot of time to spend studying your report, then clearly you must take a different approach.
You are probably also communicating with your own employees who are, after all, key stakeholders.The sustainability report can be a highly effective tool to get them ‘on board”.
The huge challenge facing sustainability report designers in most instances, then, is that the report must ‘talk” to people drawn from all sides of the spectrum.
Can this be done? Yes! Present the information in a very logical, step-by-step manner. Each new page should build on the information provided in preceding pages. Each new section should be introduced, including what you are measuring, how it was measured, what the impacts are. It must include the hard data.
The MD’s introductory report and key indicators presented early in the report should have prepared the way for the information that follows.
Avoid jargon. There is nothing more off-putting than techno-speak that only insiders understand – remember, you are communicating with ordinary souls. The same goes for acronyms.
Reporting the fact that you have reduced your LTIFR from 2.5 to 1.5 may speak volumes to a safety representative, but without an appropriate explanation (tuck it away in a box) your average reader is none the wiser.
Most readers won’t have the patience to keep turning to your glossary page at the back to figure out what your acronyms mean either. Spell it out.
Don’t cram a lot of text and/or data on to a page. Space it out. Try and break it up with appropriate illustrations, graphs or tables.
Intersperse information with relevant case studies which demonstrate your company’s commitment. If you don’t have case studies, you’re probably in trouble.
Present your safety, health and environment policies clearly and simply. Avoid lengthy texts on all the good things your company intends to do – stick to reporting on the things you have already done. Quantify social impacts – how many people benefited from your donations to a rural school, and how exactly did they benefit?
Won’t the experts be bored stiff by all this step-by-step reporting? Maybe a little, but if they’re really smart they will turn to the data tables which contain all the relevant hard information in compact form.
Illustrations
Environment reports produced in the past often used pretty pictures of nature in a vain bid to persuade the reader of their commitment to conservation and love for the environment. This kind of imagery used in sustainability reports simply doesn’t work.
Rather use images that add value to the information being presented – specific photographs that add to the readers’ understanding of aspects you are reporting on. And don’t use the magic of Photoshop to wipe out unwanted smudges. It is tempting, but it is deception nonetheless.
Photographs or illustrations showing different aspects of your process, or details from key plant or equipment can be effective, especially if they add to the readers’ understanding of your business. This report should be easy to read on more than one level. Well-chosen photos with informative captions help to achieve this.
A detailed illustration of the aluminium smelting process laid out over five pages in Hillside Aluminium’s sustainability report in 2002/3 elicited a positive response from many stakeholders, according to Hillside’s environmental specialist, Hendrik Louw. ‘They told me they were able to understand the process properly for the first time,” he said.
Of course photos and/or illustrations play a big role in making a report attractive and readable. The experts are divided on this issue – some would argue that sustainability reports should be businesslike and to the point, and that there is no room for ‘frills”. I disagree. Good, attractive design is essential if your report is to be read and kept. Art, yes, frills no!
Caution
A note of caution, born out of experience. Finalise your facts and figures and get them approved by the MD before handing the data over to the agency designing your report. The integrated nature of sustainability reporting means that one small change can have implications elsewhere in the same report.
Getting into a whirlwind of changing facts and figures invites inaccuracies and mistakes. There is nothing more damaging to your credibility than when you present contradictory or incorrect information, and some bright spark at a stakeholder meeting picks up on it.
Another thing: it makes perfect common sense to print a sustainability report on paper that is manufactured in an environmentally responsible manner. There are a number of papers available, ranging from rough, recycled papers to good coated papers produced with pulp sourced from responsibly managed forests.
They are generally a little more expensive, which introduces a cost consideration. How much more should you be prepared to spend in order to print your report on the most environmentally sound paper available?
Answering that question raises issues central to the whole notion of sustainability. To strike the right balance is the object of the entire exercise.
Chris Chapman’s Durban-based company, Artworks Communications, designs sustainability reports inter alia for Hillside Aluminium. Hillside’s 2001/2002 report won the Best Sustainability Report category in the Greening the Future Awards in 2003