Holistic Reporting

Most sustainability reporting ‘old hands’ will have seen Unilever’s stakeholder feedback on its sustainability reporting and process ages ago but if you haven’t it’s worth a read even though it dates from early 2009.

From a holistic reporting perspective, I particularly liked:

• Illustrate linkage across issues and performance
• Reporting on achievements, challenges and dilemmas
• Connect with consumers on sustainability issues
• Social metrics need to be developed

I’m just about to get started reading Innovative CSR From Risk Management to Value Creation. But if you want to know more about this book without waiting for my words of wisdom – and I’m sure that includes most of you reading this – then I recommend heading on over to Elaine Cohen’s review of the book on CSRWire.

The AltaTerra research report Greening the Company Website: A New Era in Sustainability Reporting (registration required) summary states:

In addition to examining the websites of sixty global companies publicly recognized as environmental leaders in thirteen sectors, we developed an original analytical framework identifying eight key attributes of sustainability reporting websites.

A key finding was that:

The average score per attribute across the sixty leading companies was two (2.01) on a scale from zero to three. Companies of all types have opportunities to improve sustainability reporting and communications through their corporate website.

The report was published in January 2010 and is available online for $398.

Here are some interesting takeaways from The Sustainable MBA by Giselle Weybrecht from a holistic reporting perspective: Read the rest of this entry »

In their excellent book One Report: Integrated Reporting for Sustainable Strategy, authors Eccles and Krzus make brief references to the use of XBRL. But, IMHO, they minimize the importance that an XBRL taxonomy for sustainability reporting can bring to the table, with statements like (p.70):

“It is important to remember to emphasize that XBRL is simply (my italics) an information standard, like HTML, for making it easier to collect, report, and reuse information…It does not make new information available.”

So I’d like to unpick that a little… Read the rest of this entry »