10 reasons not to write a CSR report

I suspect most people could come up with 3,483 reasons not to write a CSR report and all are probably true, but some are truer than others. I suspect there are more companies asking themselves why not write a report today, rather than asking why. The pressure to report is increasing and more companies are joining the reporting pool each year. So here are 10 reasons not to write a (first) report.

ONE: You have nothing to report.

It's never perfect. There is always more you can do in terms of sustainability performance before you launch the process of writing your first report. There is always a balance to be found between a lightweight report and a content-rich report. You shouldn't wait until you have got everything nailed down before you report (because you never have everything nailed down). But frankly, if you have no sustainability performance to report in any of the core areas of your business operations, then producing a compilation of CSR marketing-oriented mumbo jumbo and calling it a Sustainability Report won't cut it. By all means, produce a CSR brochure, or a CSR statement or a CSR policy paper ... but a report should contain disclosures of PERFORMANCE and not just intention. So if you ain't got it, don't report it. Work on getting it.

TWO: Your sustainability performance is really awful

So you measure your carbon footprint and it's been increasing year on year. You had 5 fatalities in your operations last year. Employee engagement survey results show that more are disengaged than engaged. You just paid a $30 million lawsuit for gender discrimination. Your supply chain audit showed that most suppliers are not compliant. Your CSO has just resigned. Now is not the time to publish your first sustainability report. Get working on addressing the issues. Get some good process in place. Then think about reporting.

THREE: You have no data-collection processes in place

Your first report should not stress out the organization in a way which immobilizes it because none of the data flows that measure sustainability performance are in place. If you have no data at all in your business - you have been recycling but you haven't measured the volume, you have reduced waste but you don't know by how much, you have had calls to your Ethics Hotline but you don't know how many, you have reduced employee turnover but you haven't measured turnover rates... then you have to concentrate on getting data infrastructures in place. It is better to postpone publishing your first report than to publish one with inadequate basic data - concentrate on getting a robust data-collection process in place.

FOUR: Your data is not reliable

You still work on excel and your data aggregation relies on many different individual inputs from around your company's globe. You have no formal internal auditing procedures in place and you cannot be sure that the data is reliable. Why publish it? You will only have to issue corrections down the line, which can create credibility issues. Make sure your data is robust and accurate before publishing your first report.

FIVE: You are in your first year of business

No matter how strong your commitment is to sustainability and even if your business was founded along sustainability principles, one year is not enough to demonstrate performance in all three triple bottom line areas of sustainability. You might have had a good first year, but wait to see if your second year is similar. Publish a first report only after two full years of business.

SIX: You have no budget

Yep, sorry to tell you this, folks, but reporting costs money. It may come as no surprise that I recommend using a consultant who specializes in writing sustainability reports (yes, ok, like me!), especially if this is your first report. This is based on experience. I have several clients who have produced their own report in-house and then come to ask me to turn it into, well, a report. One client recently confirmed that their management said they "can now appreciate what a quality report looks like" after using our report-writing services, the first time they have used an external provider. There is no getting away from the fact that reporting is not something anyone can do just because they work in the sustainability area and can string a few coherent sentences together. Sustainability reporting, for it to benefit both the company and speak to its stakeholders, requires experience and skill. For a first report, allocate some money to make that happen well.

SEVEN: You have no time

Clients come to me saying "We want a report in three months." For a seasoned reporter, whose data flows are well oiled and who have very detailed logging of sustainability events throughout the year, I suspect this may be possible (though I have never been part of a reporting process which has been completed from start to publication in three months). For others, well, reporting is not an off-the-shelf product. The reporting process takes time. It has to. It requires a different approach to the presenting the business performance and a different set of stories and data-points. These take time to develop. It involves many people for whom reporting is not their most urgent priority and who have many other things to do. People go on vacation. People are sick. People just don't get around to it. You have to have enough slack in your process to allow for all of this. If you have no time in your schedule for whatever reason to allocate a realistic timeframe for the report, then postpone your first report for another year.

EIGHT: You have no buy-in

A sustainability report doesn't belong to the CSO or to any individual manager in the business. No-one can publish a quality sustainability report alone. Even if the CEO decides there should be a sustainability report, it cannot happen without the buy-in and active collaboration of the senior management team and their teams. If you find that you are just not able to generate enough support to ensure a respectable flow of content, then stop. (This doesn't mean EVERYONE has to be behind it. There will always be those on a management team who question the value of reporting). But if everyone is against, and uncooperative, hold that first report and focus your energies on helping some of them come around.

NINE: You want to maintain a reputation as non-transparent, non-accountable and unsustainable

Most companies wouldn't declare this as an objective but not reporting defaults to this. RATS (Responsibility, Transparency, Accountability, Sustainability) is the way leading companies work these days. Fact. None are perfect but most are on the journey. Not reporting is equivalent to declaring that RATS is not important to you. If that's really the case, then don't go for that first report.

TEN: You have no ice-cream

Reporting is not an easy task. Ice cream always makes it easier. If you have problems securing a regular supply of ice-cream for the reporting team, postpone that first report until you can get it organized. 

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)

The most special CSR Report of all.....

Which report is the most special report of all ? Your own report, of course. So it is with great pleasure that for the first time in the history of this blog, and all manwomankind,I am able to write a post about our own CSR Report. Yes, it's the Beyond Business Sustainability Report 2010, entitled "

" How a little consulting firm makes a big impact".  

Please download the report from our website here: http://bit.ly/gOzRCr, and of course, give us your feedback!

 Report highlights:

• covers Beyond Business's Sustainability performance 2009-2010 (the first two years of our new, merged business)
• conforms with GRI Application Level A, checked by the GRI
• includes a materiality matrix
• confirms Beyond Business as a carbon neutral company
• the first sustainability report from a consulting firm in Israel
• includes case studies from several clients and partners
• tells the story of how it is possible, with the limited resources of a small consulting firm, to make a big impact through operating responsibly, serving a wide range of clients in advancing their sustainability, and working tirelessly to create awareness for sustainable change.  

Whilst our report may not have the scale of Pepsico, Starbucks, Intel, Vodafone or Microsoft, or the multimedia appeal of Manchester City Football Club, Burts Bees or Virgin Media, or even the interactivity of SAP, the frequency of Timberland,  the integration of Novo Nordisk, the creativity of WPP, the brevity of GoLite (ha-ha), the controversy of Monsanto, the charm of Impahla or the tradition of BT, Body Shop, Shell or GE, it does present an example of a small business who believes transparency should be an essential part of any business's DNA. We believe that SME's should report, because it both serves their business interest and also because it ensures that, as essential links in the supply chain of larger businesses, they are playing their part.  Even a small business such as ours learnt something in the process of reporting, not least of which was setting sustainability targets for ourselves for the coming years. Whilst we have a built-in advantage versus other SME's in that we can write our own report, as this is our expertise, the investment for producing such a report for a small business is not so devastating as to make it prohibitive. As a strategic businesss investment, we believe it's an essential tool.

As far as Beyond Business is concerned, a further reason for reporting is the need to practice what we preach. When we talk to clients, encouraging them to be more transparent, we will now feel much better knowing that we have personally undertaken this voluntary reporting approach ourselves.Walking the talk is just as important in consulting as it is in any other business. Sustainability consultants who provide sustainability services should produce their own reports. Some great reports which I am aware of by local sustainability consulting firms are:

• FrameworkCR 
• Sustainability Services South Africa
• Article13  (Communication on Progress) 
• Banarra

I mean, why would a company, who is interested in developing its own transparency, work with a consulting firm who is not transparent to help it become more transparent?

Anyway, I digress.

I do hope you will take a look at our first report and tell us what you think. Thanks in advance. 

And now... you know what sustsinability reporting dessert looks like, don't you?

Hint: Rhymes with Funky Punky.

Second hint: It's really tasty.

Final hint: I don't think it really contains monkeys.  

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, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

7 Reasons CSR consultants should use social media

I have been asked to give a talk to a Forum of CSR consultants about why CSR consultants should use social media in order to ... well.. become better CSR consultants. I thought I would do a little test. I have prepared and posted my presentation to Slideshare, and it will be interesting to see how many CSR consultants who attend my talk will have picked it up before the talk. Should I make a little wager with myself? Hmm, I will guess no more than 10%. Otherwise, what would be the purpose of me going to talk to them? Duh!

Anyway, I apologise for the rather self-congratulory nature of the content, but the easiest way to give examples of how social media adds value for CSR consultants was to give examples from my own activity, because I find social media enriching, rewarding, educating, entertaining, (time-consuming), (addictive), challenging, enlightening, fun and always adding value to the knowledge, awareness, insights, information and service I can bring to my clients. I have taken real recent examples from my #csr life on social media, and included tweets, facebook and other conversations. I would like to thank all the unwitting partners in my social media engagement for providing me with material for this talk, and hope they will retroactively grant me permission to use their stuff in my presentation.

Here is the presentation.

7 Reasons CSR Consultants should use Social Media

View more presentations from elaine cohen.

elaine cohen is the joint CEO of BeyondBusiness, a leading reporting and social-environmental consulting firm. Visit our website at: www.b-yond.biz/en

what are csr consultants good for ?

You are about to develop, or rethink your Sustainability strategy. You are about to devise a program for advancng women in your business. You are about, finally, to write your carbon management policy. You are about to conduct, for the first time, an encompassing stakeholder engagement and dialogue process. You are pouring over your materiality analysis and wondering how to pioritize all those issues that came up. You are responding to queries from the CFO regarding the return on investment of the Company's community involvement program. You are wondering what the competition are doing in the CSR and sustainability space. You are contemplating a cause marketing campaign to boost sales and help the community. You are about to write your first CSR report. Or your second, Or your third. Or your thirteenth. Any of these hit home?  Because the next question is tougher. Should you hire a consultant?

After almost twenty years as a practitioner, I have now been a consultant for the past 5 years. Actually, I never held very high views about the contribution of consultants. You know, like the jokes.For example: Consultants are like people who borrow your watch to tell you the time and then walk away with it. Or the one where the consultant starts off to help become part of the solution and ends up being part of the problem. So why did I become a CSR consultant? I won't bore you with the biographical details, but now that I am one, I believe I add value. In fact, my clients believe I add value. Recently, a potential new client, a CSR Manager, asked me to help formulating a response to internal challenges such as: What do you need a consultant for? Why can't we do CSR in house? Prove that we need a CSR consultant!!

Hidden in these challenges are basic questions (doubts?)  about the value of consultants in any business activity, but also the view of CSR as a profession in its own right with specific areas of expertise. CSR is not something people do because thay have nothing else to do. Or because they are altruists. It's a profession like any other. Developing and evolving, but it is a profession.

Here is my take on CSR consultants and why they add value. Of course, there are CSR consultants and there are CSR consultants. Good and bad, as in any profession. How you select your consultant is another thing altogether. But let's assume, for the purpose of this exercise, that we are talking about  highly professional, competent, skilled, amicable and ethical consultants. (Oops, did I  blush?)

Use your internal resources  for core activities.  Consultants provide expertise which is not present in the organisation. It doesn't need to be present in the organisation. No CSR Manager of any business can be an expert in everything that is going on in the world of CSR, and doesn't need to be. The CSR Manager should be driving assimilation in the business, using a range of tools (which may include external proceses). The CSR Manager's job is about building CSR capabilities in the business. This needs different knowledge, skills and competencies than those a consultant brings to the table. Consultants are focused in their area of expertise. If they are good, they spend almost as much time maintaining their knowledge and updating their frames of reference as they do imparting it to clients.That's their core business. In the field of CSR, this means keeping abreast of daily developments and changes in the CSR/Sustainability landscapes, understanding the latest revision of the AccountAbility standards, knowing the content of the latest ISO26000 draft revision, knowing which Sector Supplements the GRI has issued, knowing who won the CRRA 10 reporting awards (ha! Gotcha, the voting is still on),knowing the EICC exists for relevant clients,  or the UNPRI, or the Equator Principles, or the UNGC, CEO Water Mandate, knowing who tops the CDP list, knowing which conferences are happening , knowing the outcome of COP15,  and its potential impact on business and the low-carbon economy (ok, that wont take long) knowing which are High Purpose and which are Vanguard Companies, knowing the state of upcoming green legislation in your country, and knowing what's trending and  how to leverage what's trending . And more. This reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant book, The Outliers. The idea is that you dont get to be top in class at something because you were in the right place at the right time.  You get to be an outstanding achiever because you invested hours upon hours of developing your knowledge and skill. That's what a good consultant does, so that she can quickly understand your needs and make the right associations from the wealth of information overload that is floating around the CSR ecosystem, quickly analyse what's relevant for your business and make appropriate observations and recommendations. Why would a CSR Manager want to do all this? And how could a CSR Manager do all this without diverting her own attention from the core of improving business CSR capabilities. My clients, and I suspect my colleague consultants' clients, know that this high level expertise is worth budget, but not capex. Why buy the Chunky Monkey Machine when you can buy the Chunky Monkey? This, of course, assumes you want to deliver a good product - a good strategy, a good policy, a good program, a good report. Each organization has to judge to what extent this external expertise is necessary for them to achieve their objectives.

Save time not reinventing the wheel. CSR consultants have methodologies and tools and process which save time. I am working on producing a Communications on Progress for the United Nations Global Compact right now for four different clients, each with a different core business, a different need to communicate and at a different stage in their overall CSR Activities. Each facing different dilemmas and holding different hopes about what such a Communication process will do for their organization. Whilst the style, tone, content and length of each communication will be different, my base methodology and approach saves each client a significant amount of time. Same goes for Sustainability reporting. I hear many Companies who embarked on their first reporting process describing months and months of activities, some even more than a year. Consultants can, and I can prove this from experience with my own clients, reduce the lead-time for the reporting process, precisely because they have done similar work several times over and know the process, pitfalls and opportunities. Recently a client asked me to produce an analysis of various sustainability metrics for SRI Indices. I was able to do this in a few hours because I am so familiar with the tools involved. A newcomer to the field would probaby have taken twice the time.

Don't expect to see everything from the inside. CSR consultants are able to spot things that are dissonant within the organization that might not have picked up. A recent example is a client of mine who has outstanding "green" credentials, adherence to leading "green" standards, great green technologies and excellent tracking of all environmental metrics which show strong reduction of environmental impact over time. This, however, is not leveraged by the marketing function, and appears nowhere in the Company's marketing literature, product information or website. A clear instance of internal silos which a professional on the outside looking in can clearly see. I did so and pointed this out to the marketing team, and I will bet any money that this will be addressed in the coming months. No-one wants to waste an opportunity. Of course, this could have been spotted internally. But, it wasn't. I could offer many more examples from the the last few years and several clients. The plain fact is, that it's hard to see everything from the inside.

Sometimes, someone else needs to say it. Having been on the "inside" in global businesses for so many years, you just have to realise that sometimes, the internal voice is not the strongest one, no matter how right it is. Sometimes, the divergent (did someone say political?) forces in an organization prevent the right recommendation from winning the day. Sometimes, the perceived authority of an external expert is what it takes. This is why, for example, I was the one  to deliver training in sustainabliity to the Board of Directors of a leading financial services group, and recommend a Board procedure for CSR leadership, which the Board then adopted. Coming from the internal CSR Manager, this might have carried less weight. 

External reality is on the outside. CSR is about direct and indirect impacts. Direct impacts need to be managed internally, they are about how the organization behaves. Indirect impacts are the things an organization does that carry its influence  well beyond the scope of its internal actions. How does an organization know what impacts it is having? How does an organization know the context of the external reality that is is competing in? Dialogue with stakeholders, sure, but which stakeholders? What issues?  What questions? How can the organization know what it doesn't know? A good CSR consultant will have the answers to creating the picture of this external reality. A recent project of mine for a global client was to map the entire social media landscape for CSR communications in Europe and recommend a social media approach in Europe for their business. I knew how to do this. I spend half my life in social media and CSR. I knew what they didnt know and where to look for it. I could bring them their external reality. In other cases, and this is particularly relevant when we are writing CSR reports, clients sometimes need to be aware of competitive activity in the CSR field, because reporting naturally is an opportunity for someone somewhere to create a benchmark. We never start a report without first mapping all the relevant sector reports and listing all the material issues that show up. Of course, that could be done internally. But when the CSR Manager is spending all her time looking for and reading reports, she is not advancing CSR in the business.

Leave time to go to the beach. How much can an internal organization handle? A business has two choices, Resource up for all the internal needs to do any job, not just CSR related work. Or have a lean team focusing on the core value adding work and use external experts to provide what is not-core and / or is overly time-consuming. When all is said and done, work-life balance is part of CSR and if your CSR Manager needs to do everything in -house, unless she has a very large team, she may just not have time to go to the beach.

It's cheap. It's cheaper than getting it wrong (I was recently approached by a Company who write their first CSR report internally. The report is bad. They are now looking to hire a consultant to clean it up, correct it and upgrade it). It's cheaper than maintaining an expanded team. It's targeted expenditure to deliver improved business results over time. A good consultant should contribute more than the value of his or her fee, though sometimes this is hard to quantify with precision.

So there you have it. This is a totally subjective view. Bit like asking Santa what he thinks about Christmas. (note: seasonal flavour for this Boxing Day post).

Use of a CSR consultant should be a balanced decision based on:

• Company CSR needs and objectives
• Levels of familiarity with leading CSR practices and CSR expertise
• Size of the CSR team
• Lead-time for the CSR assignment or ongoing requirements on a retained basis
• Budgets
• Complexity levels of internal (CSR) processes.

Oh, and a good CSR consultant also tells his/her clients when they don't need him/her any more. Because you won't need your consultant forever. Which is one of the reasons you hired him/her in the first place..

elaine cohen is the joint CEO of BeyondBusiness, a leading reporting and social-environmental consulting firm . Visit our website at: www.b-yond.biz/en