It’s Time to Take Your Sustainability Reporting Online

Investor attention on sustainability reporting continues to grow, as evidenced by this year’s Letter to CEOs from Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO. In it, he reinforces climate risk as an investment risk, and pushes companies to focus on delivering on a purpose and improving the reporting of sustainability disclosures to stakeholders.

This increasing scrutiny by investors means your company’s sustainability performance and disclosures must be easy to find and understand. For most companies, the go-to format for sustainability reporting is a beautifully-designed print report or PDF, but if that’s the only way you are sharing sustainability info, investors and other stakeholders might be missing some of your important updates.

An online hub for your sustainability reporting compliments your PDF report by providing up-to-date environmental, social and economic performance data, addressing company governance and risk management, and highlighting key projects or actions your company is taking, all in one easy-to-find place for your stakeholders. What is the benefit to your company?

• Improve your rankings with investor ratings agencies: At the US Chamber Corporate Citizenship Conference, Catherine Hernandez-Blades, former senior vice president, chief brand and communications officer for Aflac, talked about how they created an online ESG Hub to make it easier for the various investor ratings agencies – and most importantly the human and digital data scrapers – to search for information on the company’s ESG performance. Reflecting content from your printed report into web copy means they will be able to find it more easily, and give you credit for your work.
• Make content more findable for all stakeholders: Many people looking for specific information about your company’s sustainability efforts will start their search for information in Google or the search bar on your own website. When you have an online sustainability hub, you can optimize each page for the types of content these stakeholders are looking for, connecting them directly to what they need.
• More easily report against multiple sustainability reporting frameworks: GRI, SASB, TCFD, and more. There are multiple reporting frameworks and some stakeholder groups prefer one to another. With an online hub, you can easily publish multiple framework indexes – or combined indexes – to show how your sustainability reporting addresses the key concerns of all these frameworks, so you can appeal to each stakeholders’ needs without having to generate multiple reports.
• Update content more regularly: An online report enables companies to provide updates to performance data more regularly than waiting for an annual printed report. You can also highlight interesting programs and accomplishments throughout the year in real time.
• Repurpose content to share your sustainability: When your sustainability strategy, goals and performance live online, you can more easily share key statistics or stories on your company’s social channels and other online media to amplify awareness of your company’s efforts.

Ready to start reporting or move your current sustainability reporting efforts online? We can help. Email us for a free consultation at inquiries@standingpartnership.com.