10 ways to liberate the sustainability report

Yesterday saw the publication of the SMI-Wizness Social Media Sustainability Index, a must-read for anyone who wants to know who are the corporate movers and shakers of the social media cypermap and what they are doing and why.  According to the report, authored by the social-media master Matthew Yeomans, "a new landscape of social media sustainability has emerged. Today, at least 250 major corporates are engaged in some form of social media sustainability comms and more than 100 have a blog, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter channel dedicated to talking about sustainability."

The report ranks the social media practices of 100 top rated sustainable companies (selected from existing listings and green rankings) provided they have a blog, Facebook page, Twitter account or YouTube channel..  If you are serious about socmed, then at least one of these options is a must-have.

Companies today are using social media "to not just communicate their sustainability stance but also to involve the public in building a better world". The main ways in which they do this include hiring experienced filmmakers, writers and reporters to tell a complicated story well, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, creating alliances with NGOs, charities and conservation watchdogs to support common goals and raise awareness, leveraging the public through campaigns and contests, and more. Twitter is the main platform used by corporates, followed by Facebook, YouTube and a Company blog. See the full report to see who does what best. But here's a hint. The top ten in social media.

The methodology of calculating the ranking for the 100 companies in the sample is based on a score of a maximum 100 points which include the following parameters:

• Useful communication: possible 20 points
• Commitment to community: possible 20 points
• Transparency (allowing comments and replying) - 10 points
• Communicating actions not beliefs - possible 10 points
• Social media shareable CR/Sustainability Report - possible 10 points
• Regular updates of social media communication - possible 10 points
• Creative storytelling - possible 20 points

GE came out as the overall best with a score of 93 points, retaining its first place from last year because of consistent leverage of social media channels to advance the Ecomagination and Healthimagination agendas, and also because of its "App". There are actually several companies who are using Apps to make their reports accessible to a wider audience, as I mentioned in my CSRwire.com article earlier this month. Apps will become commonplace for Sustainability Reports, I have no doubt. Pretty soon we will need an App to track the Sustainability Report Apps. VF corporation made it into 7th place with 84 points (from nowhere last year) , mainly because of its Timberland acquisition. The Top Ten SocMed Swingers' best practices are profiled in the report which makes for fascinating reading and offers inspiration for companies which haven't yet staked their claim.

One thing that was of particular interest to reporting geeks like me was Matthew Yeoman's analysis entitled "10 ways to liberate the sustainability report". This year, 36% of the 100 companies reviewed in the index have used social media to "liberate their reports from the dungeons of disinterest" (wow, a little harsh, maybe? Remind me to take a look in my local dungeon for the 64% which have apparently stayed there). Anyway, 36% is more more than double the number of companies which were reported to be dungeon-free  last year. The ones who are picked out for commendation are:

• GE : for their iTunes App
• Alstom : with a shareable microsite
• Timberland: for use of social channels
• SAP: for an interactive materiality matrix
• North Face: for use of video
• Alcatel Lucent: for publishing their report on Scribd
• Danisco: for publishing on Slideshare
• UPS and McDonald's: for use of infographics
• Ford: for a sharable digital map

Finally, the report also lists the top 100 Sustainability Twitterers (among which I am proud to be counted) and I will now happily call myself a member of the Wizness Green Twitterati. 22 of the 100 are company twitter handles and 20 are NGO's. A good a #CSR #FF list as ever there was.

By now it is clear that Sustainability without Social Media is like Ice Cream without a Spoon. It's all in the delivery. The SMI-Wizness Social Media Sustainability Index will help you think about what companies are doing today to leverage their sustainability platforms through all the social media possibilities that are available. The author even offers a checklist to help companies get thinking about telling their social stories. The only thing that's missing is what flavor ice-cream the corporate bloggers prefer.

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my business website www.b-yond.biz/en  (BeyondBusiness, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

Starbucks, optical illusions, Danisco, H&M and blog traffic

I am not a fanatic about blogging stats. I write about what interests me and what I have an opinion about. I try to do so in a way which will be both informative and entertaining, and, sometimes, persuasive. I don't feel I am in competition and I don't do anything specifically to improve my blog stats, other than some tweets and retweets. From time to time, I take a look behind the scenes. Blog stats can tell you a lot about what your audience finds interesting. What do people search for, for example, that brings them to this blog? Checking out CSR Reporting Google Analytics, I found that the top ten key search terms of all time (around  two and a half years) on this blog are:

CSR Reporting: Hah! Now isn't that a surprise. This is the second item in a Google search for csr reporting. What's the first ? Wikipedia's Corporate social responsibility page.

Optical illusions: After scrolling through 400 returned search items (out of a possible 11,300,000), I could not find any reference to the CSR Reporting Blog. Funnily enough, though, my most read post of all time was about optical illusions.

Elaine Cohen: Yep, that's me. I suppose this is no surprise either. There are 11,000,000 returned search items with my name in them somewhere, but the CSR Reporting Blog is top of the list. No separating me from my blog, I guess.

Starbucks CSR Report 2010: The fifth returned search item for this search term is actually a post I wrote about Starbucks 2009 Sustainability Report. I did also write a post about Starbucks' 2010 report and some of the challenges they face, and no, I was not sipping a caramel frappucino at the time.

Best CSR Reports: This search terms brings the CSR Reporting Blog up in first place with a post called The Top Ten Reports of 2010. Guess that means I will have to do another post with the top ten of 2011 in a few months :).

Elaine Cohen Blog: The first item returned in this search is this blog, followed by antother four links to me and my writings in different places. However, the sixth item that turns up is Elaine Cohen Chow Champ, my namesake blogger who is a food writer, educator, and an all-purpose healthy food promoter. Healthy food? Hmmm. Hope she likes ice cream.

Danisco: Here again, I can't see exactly how this search term delivers anyone directly to this blog as it does not show up anywhere in the first 15 or so pages of items returned out of a total of over one million. I did write a post about Danisco's 2009 Sustainability report so I guess it's in there somewhere.

Starbucks Sustainability Report 2010: This returns (as the third item) the same post on the Starbucks 2009 Sustainability Report as the previous Starbucks search.

Starbucks Corporate Responsibility Report 2010: Ditto.

H&M CSR: The first item returned with this search is  a post I wrote about the H&M old clothes in New York fiasco which caused a little uproar and almost certainly a revision of warehouse procedures at this global fashion chain (the fiasco, not the post!) .

What have I learned from all of this aside from the fact that many, many people are interested in Starbucks' sustainability performance? I guess I now know that, if I want to increase my blog stats, I must write about Starbucks, optical illusions, Danisco and H&M. Maybe I will try that for a few months. It may get a bit boring but at least the stats will go through the roof :)

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices  Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my business website www.b-yond.biz/en  (BeyondBusiness, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

Congrats, Danisco!

I couldn't let today end without a BIG congratulations to Danisco for winning the award for best report of a company listed on NASDAQ OMX Copenhagen A/S (C20). Read the full  news item here.

Having worked with Danisco on this report, I know how personally committed the team are both to sustainability and to transparent and comprehensive reporting. This award is a tribute to a company who is getting it right.

 See my post about the Danisco report from June of this year.  

All that remains is for Danisco to make it a hat trick in the CorporateRegister.com CRRA 11 Reporting awards. The report is entered in three categories:

#  Best report

#  Best openness and honesty

#  Best carbon disclosure

PLEASE go to CRRA 11 and place your votes.

Danisco for first place in the three categories above.

Don't worry - there are nine categories - you can vote for any report you choose in the other six :)

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my business website www.b-yond.biz/en (BeyondBusiness, CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

The Paradox of Sustainability Reporting

Followers of this blog and my sustainability report reviews will know that I often refer to direct impacts and indirect impacts. Maybe I should clarify what I mean.

Direct impacts

These are all the actions of a company which have an impact on stakeholders. This can be anything from reducing carbon footprint to creating a new environmentally friendly product to paying employees a living wage to volunteering in the community - anything that the company actually does and its direct effect on stakeholders.

Indirect impacts

These, in my CSR lexicon,  are really the effects, results or outcomes of  direct impacts. By developing a cause marketing campaign (action which creates a direct impact on those involved in the campaign or benefit directly from the cause), a company may be influencing awareness and consumer behaviour in an indirect way. By developing a new environmental technology, a company may be influencing consumer habits far beyond the specific action the company invested in order to develop a product. A bank may lend money in a responsible way (direct impact) but the whether the money is used in a responsible way is the indirect impact. An ingredients supplier such as Danisco has an indirect impact on  (1) the way  manufacturers make products with more sustainable characteristics and thereby change consumer habits and (2) the sustainability impacts of manufacturing  supply chain processes at customers who buy their ingredients.   

Indirect impacts, in many ways, are outcomes of direct actions. A company cannot control indirect impacts, only direct impacts. But if we think of the direct impact as the driver and the indirect impact as the outcome, then indirect impacts should be of vital relevance to any company's sustainability thinking.   

The interesting thing about this is that in almost any business, industry or sector, the indirect impacts are always far, far greater than the direct impacts. This represents the real difference a company can make as it adopts a sustainability approach, impacting much more widely than its immediate actions. HP say this in their 2009 Global Citizenship Report: "The IT industry is responsible for about 2 percent of global GHG emissions. But our products and services offer great potential to help reduce energy use and emissions throughout the global economy—the other 98 percent."  In determining their sustainability strategy, HP is conscious not only of their activities for designing, manufacturing, marketing, selling and distributing products but also on the way they are used by consumers, in order to impact far beyond the scope of HP's actual operations. An HP printer may be manufactured in a sustainable way but the way it utilizes ink, enables dual-side printing, is recyclable etc determines the level of potential environmental impact through its lifecycle. By now, everyone knows that the carbon footprint of a T-shirt is mainly in the wear and laundry of the T-shirt thoughout its lifecycle which overtake the carbon emissions generated by its actual manufacture. 

Where am I going with this ? One more thing and we will get to the paradox. 

See, I read hundreds of Sustainability Reports. Most of these reports relate to what the Company is doing to behave as a responsible business and advance local or global sustainability. No matter what the report structure, they always come back to impacts in the marketplace, workplace, community and environment and the narrative is almost exclusively about what the Company has done, how much it has invested, how many people were involved and how good everybody felt. For companies that report metrics, these metrics measure all of this: how many volunteering hours, how many training hours, how many emissions, how many hybrid trucks are used in distribution, how many eco-products have been developed, how much money has been spent.  But frankly, what use is it to me to know that employees volunteered for 50,000 hours if I  don't  know what kind of a difference they made during those hours? I dont mean where they went and which project they advanced. I mean what DIFFERENCE did they make? Same with our HP printer example. Who cares if HP or any other company has developed a program to recycle printers? What we should care about is how many consumers actually recycle printers. The program is the input or the enabler, the actual level of recycling is the outcome. The outcomes are what we want.

All of these input -type metrics are important as management reports to guide decision making around resource allocation and get a sense of progress in working to plan. Usually, good basic sustainability practice should create strong indirect impacts. However, it takes time and energy to maintain adequate systems to manage sustainability practices and report on them. It's much easier to measure what you do than the result of what you do. So ...

and here is the paradox ....

companies spend their time and energy reporting on direct impacts when indirect impacts are much more crucial evidence of the way they are changing the world. What really matters most is the outcomes, but  very few companies report on these. Most indirect impacts can be measured to a lesser or greater degree with the right kind of analytical thinking, but very few companies go the extra mile to attempt this.

If one thing needs to change about sustainability reporting, it has to be the practice of publishing a shopping list of actions and instead reporting on the value a company adds to our collective sustainability. My strongest recommendation to all companies entering the reporting cycle for 2011 reports is just that:  Focus on where you are having an impact beyond your immediate actions. Let this be what drives your strategy, decisions, actions and reporting.  Think top-down, not bottom up. Make the effort to assess the difference you are making.

Get past the paradox.

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices  Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my business website www.b-yond.biz/en  (BeyondBusiness, CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

B2B Yes you can! Danisco shows how.

It is quite a pleasure to write about a recently published Sustainability Report - this time from Danisco, the Danish bio-based food ingredients supplier. It is a pleasure not only because the Danisco report is somewhat different from most of the reports you will see flying around these days, but also, because, by way of disclosure, I supported Danisco in the development of this particular report. Don't get me wrong - Danisco did all the hard work - I came in at the back end of the process to offer some specific assistance to the reporting team. Anyway, let me tell you a little about Danisco and their 2010 Sustainability Report. 

Danisco uses raw materials from nature and transforms them into ingredients which contribute to the improved sustainability of our lives - mainly ingredients which improve the quality and health properties of what we eat, but also of things we wear, drive, use and interact with in many different ways. In fact, I had been familiar with Danisco as a food ingredients supplier - I had no idea of the wide range of applications their products can serve. Danisco is based in sunny Copenhagen, Denmark, employes 6,800 people, and operates from over 49 manufacturing sites around the world. Danisco’s ingredients are used globally in a wide range of industries including bakery, dairy, beverages,  animal feed, laundry detergents, tyre manufacture, and bioethanol. Danisco's Sustainability Director, Jeff Hogue, is a frequent social-media-ite and tweets as @JeffreyHogue.

The most significant thing about Danisco's sustainability impacts are that they are greatest once the shipments have left the plant. Many companies' significant impacts are indirect in this way. But Danisco's impacts are two degrees removed - first they sell to manufacturing businesses, then the manufacturing businesses sell their brands to the final consumer. So, although Danisco might not be a household name (well, except perhaps, in Copenhagen),  Danisco makes a far greater impact on our lives than you might guess, doing so through the way the Company develops innovative technology and new products, and supports and collaborates with its customers who make the end products we consume. Take bread, for instance. Danisco tells us that  "In the UK alone, more than 320,000 tonnes of bread is discarded each year because it has lost its freshness. Methane produced by that waste equates to more than 1.4 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents." Addition of Danisco enzymes can help  keep bread fresher up to seven days longer, potentially saving two million tonnes of flour per year and making more bread available with no increase in flour. In the UK alone. Think of that as applicable worldwide. Big numbers. How many times have you thrown out bread that became stale and unappetizing ? It happens, right ? Danisco doesn't make bread. But through Danisco's work with bread-manufacturing companies and bakeries, the consumers have access to a much more sustainable product and lifestyle.

Another example? Take this story about milk in Kenya: " In 2007, worldwide milk production is estimated to be 655 million tonnes with over 30% produced in developing countries. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) forecasts that demand for milk in the developing world will double by 2030. Developing countries are not self-sufficient with milk, and dairy imports to developing countries in value terms grew by 43% between 1998 and 2001.The vast majority of the milk in developing countries is produced on small-scale farms (fewer than five milking cows), without cooling systems. The FAO estimates that 25-50% of the milk from small-scale farmers is wasted." Danisco is working on a technology involving adding an enzyme to the milk at the point of production which would extend the life of milk for 12-15 hours without cooling - thereby avoiding most of the waste in this supply system. This development offers a tremendous economic, social and environmental benefit, a true sustainability springboard. Danisco does not produce milk either. As consumers, we are happily unaware of the positive impact on the sustainability of our lives that the Danisco range of products offer, yet we gain the benefit in many of our everyday consumption patterns. One final example of a super development is in the area of car tyre production - in a collaborative project with Goodyear, Danisco is developing a bio-based, renewable synthetic rubber for use in car tyres with an investment of $50 million, to support our move away from dependency on fossil-based fuels. Renewable car tyres. Danisco are not in the tyre business, but when you are taking your new hybrid out for a spin, you will be able to rest assured that fuel consumption is low not only in the engine but also in the road-grip. These examples represent the core "ingredients for sustainability" proposition that is the backbone of Danisco's sustainability strategy and 2010 report.

Danisco's reporting squarely places these issues in context. Going way beyond the Company's internal, direct, impacts - and these are reported comprehensively (massive reductions in waste, total carbon emissions, water consumption and wastewater generation in the environmental sphere and significant positive workplace improvements including reduced accident rates etc,)  Danisco's report addresses overarching challenges our global society faces in the run-up to 2050, where the global population will increase to 9 billion (from 6.8 billion) and will need solutions to food security issues, dependence on fossil fuels and petroleum-based chemicals, and  growing health issues. Danisco explains the naure of these challenges, the associated risks, and strategy that Danisco has developed to adapt its core business proposition to support finding the right solutions - the right "ingredients for sustainability". 

As mentioned, I am entirely not impartial in relation to this particular Company report, though I spare you many other interesting aspects that I would have been pleased to mention (I know blog-readers have short-attention spans) but I hope this will not prevent you from taking a look at the Danisco report and pondering the broader issues we face as a society and the role that responsible businesses play, even those whose brand-names doen't jump out at us from the supermarket shelf or the car showroom. And when B2B Companies tell you that CSR doesn't apply to them because they don't produce consumer-facing brands, you can quote the Danisco report as absolute proof of the opposite.

elaine cohen is a CSR Consultant, Sustainability Reporter and Co-Manager of Beyond Business, a leading social and environmental consulting and reporting firm. Visit our website at www.b-yond.biz/en