For most companies, producing an ESG report is a total bear. Deciding which framework to use, collecting data, conducting materiality assessments, internally sourcing and sharing your so-called sustainability stories… it’s a Sisyphean time suck, which for too many businesses, results in a report that misses the mark by trying to hit too many marks all at once.
Apart from being posted and promoted via a few Tweets, Facebook posts and maybe an article or two, the project is too often done and dusted within a few weeks after launch. The harsh truth is that your core audience for these reports—investors and analysts—would be happier to see your ESG data delivered in the form of spreadsheets. Your other stakeholder groups—consumers, customers, communities, the media—are, for their part, even less likely to spend precious time and fleeting attention fishing through a 100-page ESG report for nuggets of information, even if attractively packaged alongside brand-building stories.
Static reports, in short, particularly voluminous ones, are not necessarily the best channel to deliver information that resonates, inspires, motivates, and activates stakeholders. These audiences need to be emotionally engaged, ideally by a cascade of compelling content that lives alongside, not inside, your report.
To get the most out of the ESG reporting process, businesses would be best served by transcending the silos whose boundaries make too many worthy reports sink, not swim:
Consulting Communications
Rather than relegating ESG reporting exclusively to the sustainability team at your company, give the communications experts a seat at the table from the get-go. Strategic communicators can help integrate the ESG reporting process and product into the overall communications plan, ensuring that it ladders up to the business strategy and that ESG efforts, initiatives and achievements are fully integrated into a company’s DNA.
Targeting and Segmenting Key Stakeholder Audiences
While ESG reports are useful vehicles for sharing key information about environmental, social and governance practices, they don’t necessarily align with stakeholder concerns—even when the ESG data is supported by so-called sustainability stories. To be sticky, those stories need to be targeted, packaged and promoted to address the unique interests and aspirations of the various stakeholder group. Stories that resonate with one audience may not resonate with another.
Consumers for example—particularly millennials—want to know they’re supporting businesses that contribute to the environmental and social well-being of the world. However, chances are they’re not gathering that information by leafing through your ESG report. Employees want to derive meaning from their work. In fact, the accounting firm PWC recently found that 86% of employees prefer to support or work for companies that care about the same issues they do. Again, employees would probably prefer to find out about a company’s sustainability stance from, say, a video or an infographic—a medium more accessible than a stodgy, voluminous report.
Engaging Stakeholders Emotionally
While reports deliver key data and even stories, effective communications go beyond the delivery of information. Communications is meaningful and actionable when it persuades people by evoking and emotional response.
In other words, prospective employees not only know they’re working for a company that is contributing to good, they want to feel proud of their place of work.
Consumers want to know they’re making responsible choices and to feel that the purposes of the businesses they patronize and support are aligned with their own.
Beyond knowing that a company is protecting natural resources and contributing to the lives of the people who live there, community members what to feel cared for.
So…rather than investing time, money, and effort in producing a 100-page report that most likely will never be read cover to cover, consider trimming your company’s virtual ESG pages and reallocating that time, money and effort by strategically targeting and telling your sustainability stories in ways, and via channels, where those audiences are already spending their precious time.