Santa Claus Inc. 2016 Material Topics Report

With zero shopping days left before Christmas, the time is here once again to preview Santa's Sustainability Report. Reporting is a long Santa tradition. Check out Santa's prior reports: 

🎅Santa’s 2015 SDG Report 

🎅Santa's 1750th Sustainability Report 2014 

🎅Santa's First G4 Comprehensive Sustainability Report 2013 

🎅Santa's First Integrated Financial and CSR Report  2012

🎅Santa's 1,747th 2011 Annual CSR Report 

🎅Santa's 1,746th 2010 Annual CSR Report

🎅 Santa's 1,745th 2009 Annual CSR Report 

Santa Claus Inc. 2016 Material Topics Report 

 🎅 Leadership Message  🎅

Dear Stakeholders 

Oh, what a year 2016 has been. Ups and downs, downs and ups. Fortunately, profits have been up for the 346th successive year although almost everything else has been down. That includes Santa’s mood in the wake of startling turns of events in the political arena, mentioning no names Trump Brexit, corporate fraud mentioning no names Wells Fargo, devastating natural disasters in different corners of the globe, the spread of extremism and violence, the grim fate of populations under siege and civil war, increasing racism, sexism and terrorism and the rapidly deteriorating level of biodiversity on the planet which is destroying my reindeer population and favorite dodo egg breakfasts. 

Nevertheless, Santa is never down for long, as my mission to spread joy, goodwill and gifts throughout the holiday season is powerful enough to spur me on. In fact, my mission has such a motivating effect on me, taking away all the pain that I feel for the world’s gentle people, that I decided to recreate it in tablet form and market it as acetaminophen and hydrocodone which some of you might know as Vicodin. We call it SantaUpper. So far, we have sold several million units of SantaUpper and have noticed an interesting development. As people begin to feel greater joy and goodwill, they have become more generous of spirit and in cash. Donations to the Santa Claus Goodwill Fund have tripled and are on the way to achieving record levels by the New Year. You can help, whether or not you have ingested our SantaUppers. Send loads of money NOW to the Santa Goodwill Fund. 

Aside from this, we have received reports that some people are using far more SantaUppers than the stated dose. We understand that this drug is a little addictive. However, overdosing has given rise to another positive commercial opportunity for people and planet. The SantaUpperDowner. For those who have become critically addicted to SantaUppers, a few swigs of SantaUpperDowner (kale juice flavored with licorice, ginger and reindeer droppings) will soon bring the pain back. Sales are a little sluggish, mainly as we have not been able to maintain a steady supply of reindeer droppings because most them are used in biogas conversion to fuel Santa’s hybrid sleigh – our eco-friendly contribution to Goal 13 - so we are increasing the level of soluble fiber in our reindeer diet and expect to triple production in 2017. Reindeer are now enjoying dried figs and baked yams 3 times a day, in addition to their regular diet of Arctic char. 

Santa’s Materiality Matrix 

This year, we decided to refresh our Materiality Matrix to define the issues that matter most to our business and to our stakeholders. We consulted with many stakeholders including our teams of elves and reindeer, children around the world, parents, toy suppliers, sleigh manufacturers and sustainability experts. We asked all of these groups to suggest the issues that are of greatest importance to them and which affect their decisions about Santa Claus Inc. and rank them in order of priority. The results were not entirely surprising – especially after we massaged them a little to deliver the result we wanted. Here is Santa’s materiality matrix for 2016: 

New Hallmark Movie Series 

For years now, we have been standing idly by as Hallmark dominates the Holiday Season with Santa movies without paying any royalties to yours truly. Although the movies are often well made and star my fave performers such as Lori Loughlin, the fact remains that the holiday season belongs to Santa, not to Hallmark. However, generous as ever, we have now formed an agreement with Hallmark to produce a new Santa series that will replace Hallmark's 2016 Christmas line-up. Watch out on your big and little screens for the following New Movies: 

• Santa and the Science-Based Goals 

• Santa Brings Every Child an Eco-toy for Christmas 

• Love at the Christmas Compost Party 

• Santa Makes an SDG Wish for Christmas 

• The Sustainable Mistletoe Promise 

• My Christmas Citizenship Dream 

• A Perfect Positive Impact Christmas 

• A Heavenly Christmas Engaging Stakeholders 

• Santa and the Sustainability Reporting Mystery 

All of these full-length movies feature Santa in the starring role and they are guaranteed to bring a tear to your eye this holiday season. Lori Loughlin, Hallmark’s most proliferous and talented actress, also features in each of these movies, because she is Santa’s favorite. And she always solves the Garage Sale Mysteries which is an advantage in case there is any foul play on the set. Do let us know if you have enjoyed a Santa Hallmark movie this season. We are already working on sequels to all the above. 

New Santa Reality Series 

Santa never ceases to be amazed at the growth in popularity of reality TV and the interest that viewers have in following the personal lives of so many individuals for no particular reason. But, if the Kardashians can do it, if Mariah Carey can do it and heck, if the Amish can do it, then so can Santa. Apparently, reality TV reflects the thirst that the general population has for transparency. Santa believes that transparency could reinforce the trust and love that people everywhere have for Santa. Starting in 2017, a brand-new series of Santa Reality will air on prime time every day for a full year. In preparation for the show, we have kitted out our entire elf and reindeer population with personal microphones and we installed cameras throughout the North Pole. In order to achieve full transparency, we decided to hold nothing back. For some viewers, this may be a disturbing experience. Especially the parts where Santa is in the bathroom after the regular Wednesday breakfast curry, and one episode where overweight elves get stuck in a narrow chimney as they were preparing to help Santa deliver toys on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, the only way to resolve this situation was to demolish the chimney or dismember the elves. We chose the latter because the chimney was Trump Tower chimney and therefore very high profile. After a gruesome episode in which we cut up several elves and shipped the parts to cannibals in Fiji, we subcontracted the Trump Tower toy delivery to Alex Baldwin who successfully navigated the chimney and was filmed doing so on Saturday Night Live. 

Santa on Mars 

A new venture we have undertaken in the past year is the fulfilment of our promise to bring toys to all the children of Mars, even if we still don’t know where they are. We believe that populating Mars is the solution to a sustainable planet Earth as the likelihood of achieving the recommendations of the IPCC sometime before we all reach the age of 243 is seriously close to zero. Therefore, we have accelerated our plans to support this initiative by being inclusive and spreading our joy and goodwill to territories unknown. Getting to Mars has been a bit of a problem, as our reindeer cannot survive in Mars’s atmosphere and we didn’t have enough oxygen tanks to support our team of elves. Therefore, instead of the sleigh, we chartered a Virgin Galactic satellite, specially customized for our elf population, and we kitted out a compact team of elves with Mars survival kits, including several cans of Red Bull in case they suffer a bout of low blood sugar. In our first trial mission, we deposited several toys for children of all sexes and ages in craters around the planet. We also left a few iPhone 7’s just in case they are Mars-proof as well as waterproof, so that the kids could give us a call if they wanted to replace any toys. To our delight, we received several calls from satisfied kids on Mars. We also received several complaints about the iPhone 7’s. Apparently, the battery life on Mars is even poorer than it is on Earth, and it’s impossible to use the earphones that were “in the box” while the iPhone is on constant charge. We addressed this by shipping out a batch of recalled Samsung Galaxy Note 7’s, but they all exploded before they could reach their galactic destination. 

Toy Developments 

As we do every year, we have continued to expand our range of toys and in 2016, we decided to focus on toys that support SDG 5 – gender equality – with a breakthrough innovation: A woman Santa. Yes, this is the first ever gender-balanced Santa doll in the history of Santakind. Santa Woman comes in 5 different editions, empowering women everywhere.

 • Santa Woman Housewife: Special edition of a doll that can cook, clean, shop, raise children, make the beds, run errands, look after elderly parents, perform conjugal duties, and even make home-made ice cream. She needs very little care and attention and never gets worn out. This Santa Woman is most popular with boys. 

• Santa Woman Executive: We only make around 5% of Santa Women Executives, representing the penetration of women in leading roles in business today. This edition is first in the office every day and last to leave, wears suit and a tie, goes for drinks after work and beats all the Santa Men Executives at almost every project. The good news is that Santa Woman Executives come at about 60% of the price of Santa Men Executives and they never need to be promoted. 

• Santa Woman Miss World: This edition of Santa Woman is everyone’s favorite. Her mission is to achieve world peace and she loves animals. She looks as good in a bikini as in an evening dress, or even jeans. She has long shiny hair and doesn’t say very much other than how wonderful it would be to achieve world peace. She didn’t even speak out when unwelcome visitors stopped by the dressing room. 

• Santa Disabled Woman: We took our cue from Lego on this one. This edition comes in several versions: one in a wheelchair, one with crutches, one with no arms and one who is deaf. Despite their disability, each of these Santa Women are big achievers. The box sets come with Para Olympic gold medals, academic degrees and awards for community service. Unfortunately, there are no business awards, as these Santa Women are typically excluded from the mainstream job market.

• Santa Woman President of the United States: We had to cancel this edition due to tragic unforeseen circumstances. 

Elf Healf and Safety

Every year we provide an update on elf healf, one of our most material priorities. Our commitment is to ensure we do not kill any elves in the course of their work, thereby ensuring they retain their health. This year, in an attempt to encourage elves to accept greater accountability for their own wellbeing, we started a new scheme whereby all elves are required to take an Elf Healf survey relating to healthy lifestyles. The Survey quizzed elves about their personal health habits. Unfortunately, as our elves do not have any healthy habits, all surveys were returned blank. As a result, we decided to link elf healf to compensation and benefits. Simply put, the worse the health of the elf, the lower the compensation and benefits. Elves that are sick more than one day a year receive a 10% pay cut, more than 3 days per year, a 35% pay cut and elves that are sick more than 7 days a year actually have to pay Santa. This is quite convenient and the Santa Claus Bermuda Fund is now doing quite nicely. 

Protecting Reindeer Rights 

In line with the UK Modern Slavery Act, we revised all our reindeer contracts. We have committed, for the first time ever, to provide employment contracts where reindeer rights are explicitly detailed and grievance mechanisms are established. Since the introduction of these contracts, we have received 4 grievances. All of them were related to elf abuse. We discovered that certain elves are treating reindeer as their personal servants, and requiring them to bring them breakfast in bed, clean their living quarters and launder elf socks. After review, we determined that this is not an abuse of reindeer rights and we updated our reindeer contracts to reflect these new duties. This has resulted in a much happier elf population, very clean elf residences and far fewer smelly elf feet. 

Safeguarding against Dangerous Elf Merchandise

Over the years we have taken a strong stand against counterfeit Santa merchandise, ranging from Santa Farting Dolls, Santa apps, Santa toys and Santa movies. However, we have now turned our attention to a disturbing new trend relating to counterfeit elf merchandise. Many of you may know the book, Elf on the Shelf, by Carole Aebersold and Chanda Bell. Our elves did not object when this book was first published – what harm can a single book do? - but now, this appears to have gotten out of hand. The Elf on the Shelf website is packed with games and activities to entertain kids over Christmas in hundreds of ways. In fact, it’s so brilliant, we are annoyed we didn’t think of it first. The Elf Name Generator, for example, is extremely useful – we have already renamed several elves using the generator chart – Peppy Spiritson, Snickerdoodle Frostington, Bixby Winterville and Snowflake Candykirk are all newly named elves who are enjoying their new appellation. On the other hand, there have been reports that Elf on the Shelf is sweeping the UK and causing children to become paranoid. Believing that everything they do is scrutinized by Peppy and Snickerdoodle, children are becoming withdrawn and depressed. This created an opportunity for Santa to launch a child-dose version of SantaUpper which is already seeing sales growth. At the same time, we have decided to protect children everywhere by taking out an injunction against Elf on the Shelf for trademark infringement. By 2017, not only will elves not be on the shelves, the Santa Legal Fund will have benefited from a major influx of cash from fines paid.

Smart Distribution in Smart Cities 

In our increasingly connected world, we are finding that delivering toys has become much easier now that there are so many Smart Cities. We can now plan our delivery routes using GPS and smart mobility controls to ensure that we reach the right chimneys in the most efficient way. We also use smart parking facilities when we need to stop the sleigh to water the reindeer. The result is that we have reduced our environmental Santaprint by more than 43% in the last year alone. Not only this, we hooked in to a loophole in the smart city online infrastructures to ascertain the bank account numbers of all city dwellers. Demonstrating superior forward-thinking, we used these numbers to make generous donations to the Santa Retirement Fund, a worthy cause which we are sure all parents are happy to support, with or without their knowledge. Yes, Wells Fargo did us a BIG favor. 

Toy Quality 

As usual, we place great significance on toy quality as we aim to ensure our beneficiaries have a positive toy experience and do not become sick, or worse, dead. As a result, we took proactive steps when we discovered during routine tests that our life-size Santa Farting Doll emitted blasts with such a force that it propelled anyone in its way a distance of at least 27 meters. We therefore issued an immediate recall and recovered 23,400 dolls from 18 countries. The good news is we can now recycle these dolls, generating additional income for the Santa Retirement Fund. In future, we have decided to discontinue his line in favor of a Santa Augmented Reality Doll. All we need to distribute is a small Augmented Reality 3D viewer and our customers get the Santa Doll experience without any unpleasant consequences. 

Recognition from our Stakeholders 

As usual, this year, we received far more awards than we are able to mention in this report. Suffice it to say that the most welcome ones included a cash payment to the Santa Retirement Fund. 

Feedback on this Report 

We will be happy to receive your feedback on this report, as long as it's positive. For those of you who are unable to create your own feedback, you can use this short poll:

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So, until we meet again.....

We Wish You and Everyone in the World a Happy Holiday Season and a Happy New Year 

🎄🎄🎄🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅🎄🎄🎄

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise Guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting  AND  Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via Twitter (@elainecohen)  or via my business website www.b-yond.biz   (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm).  Need help writing your first / next Sustainability Report? Contact elaine: info@b-yond.biz 

Good Tidings from the CSR Reporting Blog

As usual, around this time of year, the CSR Reporting Blog wishes all its followers "Happy Holidays". I think I said it best last year when I quoted from the year before and the year before. We love to recycle on the CSR Reporting Blog. Here goes. Again.

This is a time to reflect on the joys of life and the joys of publishing Sustainability Reports. A time to be merry and indicator-driven. This is a time to eat well and edit well, engage with friends and dialogue with all stakeholders, think about what's important to you and call it material, recommit to your higher purpose, approve your reporting budget and select your reporting consultant.

Usually the #CSR Reporting Blog finds an innovative and humorous way to spread holiday cheer. But there is a limit to the number of alternative ways we can find to say Merry Christmas, Seasons Greetings, Have A Cool Yule, Ho! Ho! Ho! and such other appropriate expressions. This year we have settled on wishing you Good Tidings! Tidings is an word that is a little old-fashioned nowadays, and it refers to good news. That's something we could all use a several scoops of in 2016. 

So, to all the CSR Reporting Blog readers and everyone working in the CSR and Sustainability field to help make our world a better place, we wish you, your families and friends:

GOOD TIDINGS!

and to our railway worker readers: Good Sidings!
and to our flying instructor readers: Good Glidings!
and to our pest control readers: Good Insecticidings!
and to our private detective readers: Good Findings!
and to our equestrian readers: Good Ridings!
and to our curtain maker readers: Good Linings!
and to our Nordic readers: Good Vikings!
and to our chemistry major readers: Good Peptidings!
and to our funeral parlour director readers: Good Dyings!
and to our horologist readers: Good Timings!
and to our secretary readers: Good Filings!
and to our Human Resources Manager readers: Good Firings!
and to our female about-to-be-married readers: Good Bridings!
and to our confectioner readers: Good Icings!
and to our very happy readers: Good Satisfiedings!
and to our very unhappy readers: Good Suicidings!
and to our split personality readers: Good JekyllandHydings!
and to our switchboard operator readers: Good Diallings!
and to  our terrorist readers: Good Hijackings!
and to our extractive industry readers: Good Minings!
and to our Fish and Chip Shop proprietor readers: Good Fryings!
and to our very very nosey readers: Good Pryings!
and to our self-righteous readers: Good Justifiedings!
and to our boxing champion readers: Good Fightings!
and to our publisher readers: Good Bindings!
and to our readers with grumpy kids: Good Whinings!
and to our readers who passed the G4 Exam: Good Qualifiedings!
and to our readers with messy homes: Good Tidyings!
and to our readers that cannot be found: Good Hidings!
and to those readers we do not know: Good Unidentifiedings!
and to our social activist leader readers: Good Uprisings!
and to our hedonist readers: Good Wining and Dinings!
and to everyone who writes Sustainability Reports: Good Copywritings!
and to all our dental technician readers: Good Whitenings!
and to our LGBT readers: Good GayPridings!

and finally to all the CSR Reporting Blog Readers who are always looking for good news to showcase in the next Sustainability Report, we wish you:

Good  Highlightings!

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise Guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting  AND  Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via Twitter (@elainecohen)  or via my business website www.b-yond.biz   (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm).  Need help writing your first / next Sustainability Report? Contact elaine: info@b-yond.biz  

Changing the game at Virgin Media

There are times that publishing a sustainability report in hard copy, or even PDF download format, as a single document, just won't cut it with your key stakeholders. This is especially true if your business is quintessentially digital. If everything you do is digital, for digital, by digital, more digital, digital for good, digital to improve lives, digital future, digital society... then digital sustainability has to be the right fit.

So it is with Virgin Media and digital sustainability reporting. Finding the best way to use digital for delivering sustainability messages to key stakeholders has been developed quite skillfully by Virgin Media over the years. I recall Katie Buchanan, Virgin Media's Head of Sustainability, presenting at a conference some years back, telling the story of how the folks in Virgin Media's logistics team created their own video to show the sustainable steps of a Virgin Media shipment to a customer. Here's the video - always worth another look. 

Recently, Katie and I chatted again following the release of Virgin Media's latest report, starring their "5 in 5" game-changing goals that set out Virgin Media's sustainability ambitions for the next five years to both help the company grow responsibly and sustainably while doing more good with digital. Each of the goals is sponsored by a Virgin Media Executive Committee member and they cover the following areas:

• People – Nurture an engaged workforce which represents the diversity of our customers and communities 
• Products - Improve the sustainability performance of every new customer product 
• Operations - Grow our business without increasing our carbon footprint 
• Boosting business - Create the opportunities for 100,000 small businesses to grow in the UK’s economy through digital 
• Transforming lives - Transform the lives of disadvantaged people in the UK through digital technology 

The great thing about these goals is that they have a roadmap. 

 

The roadmap defines each goal in more detail, explains its relevance and states short term objectives to 2015 and longer term actions through to 2020. In the People goal, for example, Virgin Media has three quantitative, measurable objectives:

1: Increase the percentage of female senior leaders from 30% to 40% by 2018
2: Continually improve engagement levels and exceed the UK Best Employer benchmark
3: Have 80% of our people voluntarily disclosing their ‘diversity information’ by 2017

Overall the presentation of the report is superbly digital, including different types of employee-made films and blogs.

Right from the home page, you can move to the strategy, the performance and a range of digital case studies that provide further insight. Performance-wise, Virgin Media's presentation includes evidence of positive achievement, such as zero waste in the supply chain and increasing the percentage of women in leadership roles, and areas for improvement, including energy and carbon efficiency. You don't have to have a doctorate in sustainability jargon to understand it. Every one of Virgin Media's 5 million UK customers can get it. 

Reporting digitally offers great opportunity for creativity, and the use of human infographics to help illustrate performance is a worldwide first. I don't recall seeing this anywhere else ever - it 's a great way to present complex information while involving and engaging employees - and above all - make reporting FUN! 

To bring it all together, there's a resources page where you can find performance data from 2008 and other relevant information as you navigate Virgin Media's 2014 report.

(I should add that Virgin Media is part of the Liberty Global group of companies, and Virgin Media's sustainability performance is included in the the annual group global corporate responsibility report as well, addressing corporate audiences.)

Why is this so interesting? What's so riveting about great graphics and a clear website? The reasons I find this actually quite breakthrough are five-fold:

First, it's a seamless fit with the brand promise, style, tone and approach.

Second, it's totally accessible - eye-level - for consumers and not just CSR professionals.

Third, it's bold and brave, presenting a focused five year strategy commitment supported by defined actions.

Fourth, it's creative, engaging and energizing for employees, providing a platform for a step-change in action at all levels of the company.

Fifth, it's an example of how a brand can bring sustainability to the masses. The Digital for Good strategy is appealing and easy to understand. Sustainability technobabble of the kind you find in many GRI G4 reports simply wouldn't work for Virgin Media stakeholders. I wonder if this is not an approach that more companies couldn't learn from to simplify the technobabble into day-to-day messaging that we can all appreciate. 

I asked Katie Buchanan, Head of Sustainability, for her insights. She told me:

"At Virgin Media, we put the customer at the heart of everything we do. For our customers and our staff - our primary audience - a hard copy report just doesn’t work, we’ve tried! Our people are based in our call centers, retail shops, out on the road – we have to find a way to get our message out to all of them. Online is much more accessible - they can view the website anywhere, even at home. We take our content from our website – and play the films in our retail stores, in team breakout areas and so on - we try to take the message to where the audience is. We recognize that starting with our staff enables us to bring our strategy to life in a way that makes sense and is engaging to them.

"Perhaps the thing I am most proud of about our new strategy is its simplicity. It's clear, focused and aligned to our commercial strategy and brand purpose. This is the culmination of 12 months engagement with staff, 500 consumers and our Executive Committee. As part of the Liberty Global Group, we started with the group materiality exercise. This was valuable in helping us to determine which key issues to focus on.

"Our process culminated with taking 14 senior business leaders away from their desks for a full-day workshop to help bring it altogether. In creating our ambitious goals, we worked hard to make them meaningful and avoid jargon. Perhaps most importantly, the link to our commercial and business objectives is clear – for example,supporting small businesses is an important economic and social need but it's absolutely essential to our own growth as a business. This integration of business and sustainability is stronger than ever before and we expect it will be a major key to our success. 

"We have established clear governance – each goal is owned by an Executive Committee member who will drive performance and engagement. Engaging our staff through fun videos and human infographics is another way we bring sustainability to life at Virgin Media, while addressing the accountability and transparency needs of our stakeholders." 

Sounds like a game-changing approach to me. Definitely deserves ice cream.

Take a look. As usual, send feedback.


elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise Guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting  AND  Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via Twitter (@elainecohen)  or via my business website www.b-yond.biz   (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm).  Need help writing your first / next Sustainability Report? Contact elaine: info@b-yond.biz   

The Sustainability Crystal Ball

Don't you wish you could have a crystal ball that would tell you what sustainability issues are coming up to hit you in the glabella? Or somewhere else even more painful? Wouldn't you like to know the issues before your stakeholders turn you into mush? Wouldn't you want to prepare your sustainability strategy knowing that you have covered all the angles and not left materiality to fortuity? Wouldn't you want a little materiality certainty rather than a lot of materiality perplexity? 

The answer to all your wishes just may have come true with a little big thing that calls itself the Datamaran^TM. Yes, that's Datamaran, not catamaran. Catamarans are characterized by light weight, high stability, reduced drag and comfort that get you where you want to go. That's kind of what you want from technology too, so the selection of the name Datamaran for a dynamic, interactive, real-time personalizable database of sustainability issues is apparently not entirely coincidental.

Datamaran is the new little big thing for companies who want to be in control of their sustainability journey. With sustainability, there are so many variables that it's hard to stay in on top of what's most important. If you can't see the forest for the saplings, then you might need to cut through the undergrowth. (Am I mixing metaphors?)

Datamaran is the brainchild of startup eRevalue. Marjella Alma, founder of eRevalue, explained it to me: 

"Sustainability closes doors. People look at frameworks and numbers. We should take a step back, relax and then come back to see how the land lies. The frameworks that we use such as GRI or SASB should not be treated as forms you fill in and tick the sustainability “box”. Companies must first and foremost take responsibility for their impacts – “know your business” - regardless of the framework and their prescribed KPIs. But how do this when there’s many initiatives, various opinions, regulatory pressures… and you have a complex value chain?

We wanted to create a tool that would help companies understand and navigate the issues so that they can talk about what's really on the table, not reduce this important effort to “selecting from a set of generic givens”. We asked ourselves how we could put this in front of companies to help them identify emerging issues by country, by sector, by competitive landscape and by regulatory pressures. 

We wanted to help companies know what to talk about and how to establish the right kind of KPIs that are relevant for them, and early enough in the process so that companies are not caught unaware." 

HQ'd in London with a team of 25+ ESG experts, lawyers and data scientists and growing, eRevalue's Datamaran is set for a long and meaningful navigation through sustainaland.  

Marjella makes a lot of sense (She usually does. I've known her for quite a while!) We are being plied and prodded with more frameworks and regulations than we can ever imagine and more and more companies are asking, how can we cut through the clutter? More companies are looking to filter out the noise, as the folks at eRevalue say. Datamaran conjures up a set of emerging issues to be aware of as you assess what's material for your business and for your stakeholders. The issues are driven by what people are really talking about out there, as it happens. The conversations that suddenly explode into viral megaphones are caught at an early stage in the Datamaran clutches, letting you know who's doing the talking and how loud everybody else is shouting. Ultimately it becomes a real-time materiality funnel, shaping the relative force of the issues as the conversations on the radar vary in intensity.  

Datamaran works with complex search algorithms across a taxonomy of 6,000 search terms relating to 120 issues on the sustainability radar, hunting down references in corporate websites, Sustainability Reports, SEC filings, Annual Reports and increasingly, media and social media, starting with Twitter. There is also a regulatory platform where all the regulatory frameworks relative to a particular issue magically pop up, and even indicate emerging regulation that is on the radar. In short, all the things that your materiality analysis needs as you create it and as you revise it. 

For reporting, Datamaran helps you understand what's current right now. Suppose you are a company and you are about to prepare your next Sustainability Report. You have your overall strategy and materiality framework mapped out, but you are interested to know what is on the radar right now for your peer group. 

I couldn't resist having a little play around with Datamaran. (Fortunately it's not catamaran, as I am prone to seasickness). I imagined I was a large pharmaceutical company. I selected in my profile the issues that are currently on my radar and I benchmarked these against global and regional issues for my peer companies in relation to what they report in sustainability reports.

At a global level, I see that occupational health and safety, environmental issues and employee issues are picking up the most noise in terms of what pharma peer companies are reporting in their sustainability reports.    

Drilling down, I was able to get a view of how these issues play our in different regions and the relative noise created by each issue in the current landscape. When I separately benchmarked Europe, Americas and Asia, I got different rankings.

Europe

Americas

Asia

Globally, I can see that 91% of my peer companies mention waste in their sustainability reports - a sign that I had better ensure I'm on top of that too. 

Broadly speaking, the top 20 issues don't change significantly across regions - as I would not expect them to do - but in the Americas, waste comes out top; in Europe, occupational health and safety comes out top and in Asia, workforce diversity and inclusion tops the list. While these results might not be significant enough for me to entirely redraw my materiality matrix, it's certainly interesting enough for me to check out who's saying what in the different regions and why. On the subject of waste, for example, we can see the regulatory landscape of current and emerging legislation quite clearly and for each issue, Datamaran can take us back to the source legislation. 

There are a million other ways Datamaran can be useful.. I have only scratched the surface. In my chat with Marjella, I understand that the busy bees at eRevalue are technologizing away really really fast to expand the applicability and personalizability of the system to make it even more useful. This is apparently the only tool of its kind around to support sustainability material decision making and low-noise focus. 

As with any database, what comes out is only as good as what goes in, and the way the program functionality is constructed. So as long as Datamaran keeps its legs on dry land, it seems that it could be quite useful. I'll certainly keep this radar on my radar....  I always wanted a crystal ball.   

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise Guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting  AND  Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via Twitter (@elainecohen)  or via my business website www.b-yond.biz   (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm).  Need help writing your first / next Sustainability Report? Contact elaine: info@b-yond.biz   

Our Year in 2014

2014 was a super-fun-busy year for my company, Beyond Business. We supported 9 clients in the development of GRI-based sustainability reports: 7 are G4-core reports, one is G3 and one is not GRI based. In some cases, this included more extensive stakeholder engagement and/or strategic development work with these great clients, the results of which you can see in some of the reports.

We also continued to support the different and varied requirements of other new and long-standing clients including bench-marking reports, reports analysis, strategy preparation and lectures and training sessions for management and in-house sustainability teams. 

In 2014, Elaine lectured or facilitated in sustainability events in 5 countries in addition to our home base and also participated in an online debate about stakeholder engagement. Elaine contributed chapters to two sustainability educational books published in 2014. We continued to write frank sustainability report reviews that are published in Ethical Corporation magazine - 6 reviews in 2014. 

We have had an active year too on the CSR Reporting Blog with 66 posts excluding this one (that's an average of 5.5 per month) covering hundreds of sustainability reports, events, and general views on the transparency landscape. That brings the total CSR Reporting Blog posts to 511. The most popular posts of all continue to be the annual Top Ten Sustainability Report picks. 

We have responded to numerous requests for advice and assistance from students of sustainability or even fellow professionals or those aspiring to be. Through it all we have tweeted far and wide, mostly about #sustainability, #CSR and #reports, bringing our total tweets to 16,448 to 12,407 followers, at the time of writing. 

Our community involvement primarily took the form of cash donations to non-profit organizations in the areas of women's empowerment and food-waste rescue, and our team of four took a day in July to help pack food parcels that we purchased for needy families. We remain an environmentally conscious company, recycling pretty much everything and being carbon neutral since 2009, covering our modest GHG emissions through purchasing offsets. 

Alison, Gal and Iris of the Beyond Business team in 2014

Also in 2014, we created, with a little (lot of) help from design professionals, our first sustainability video featuring Dr. Sustainability, and we launched our spanking brand new website, detailing the range of services we offer and the support we can provide to corporate clients, large and small. I'd love you to check it out! You never know, maybe there is something we might be able to assist you with in 2015! If so, I'd love to hear from you!

In the meantime, we are looking forward to 2015 and another fun-packed reporting year. We hope you are too! 

Happy New Year!

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting  AND  Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via Twitter (@elainecohen)  or via my business website www.b-yond.biz   (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm).  Need help writing YOUR Top Ten Report in 2015? Contact Elaine: info@b-yond.biz   

  

Reporting is seriously undervalued

This past week, I was privileged to attend as a guest speaker the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) 2014 Annual Council Meeting in Atlanta. This will be the first of a few posts reporting from the field about the sessions where I was involved in Atlanta and highlighting the work of the WBCSD, which I found to be compelling, engaging and very leading-edge. For a quick look at what WBCSD is all about, check out the website or take a look at this post.

The first of the three sessions I took part in was the presentation of the 2014 (second annual) edition of Reporting Matters.  Reporting Matters is the bible of reporting effectiveness, using reports of WBCSD members as the basis for an analysis against 18 criteria (a "reliability" criterion was added in 2014). The new report showcases best practice examples selected from 162 sustainability and integrated reports analyzed across all criteria. This is a tremendous resource for any reporter. The Reporting Matters team from WBCSD and Radley Yeldar have done a great job in pulling this all together. What's more, overall, reports show an improvement over 2013 with 25% of reporting companies showing better materiality disclosure. 86% of reporters use GRI guidelines (up from 75% in 2013)  with 25% of reporters already having transitioned to G4. This year again, GRI reporters tended to score better than non-GRI users.

Reporting Matters 2014 was unveiled in Atlanta by the Redefining Value team. Redefining Value is one of the WBCSD's priority work areas to help deliver its Vision2050 which proposes that a "business should be measured by its ‘True Value’ and should use ‘True Costs’ and ‘True Profits’ in its internal and external reporting." This means including the costs and benefits of externalities and reporting in a way that links profit and loss, performance and value creation in the context of longer-term environmental and social impacts.

After presentation of the report and other insights from the Future Leaders development program (more about this in a future post), I was asked to share some insights about reporting. Below is the gist of what I said (including the bits I skipped over for lack of time)(I get carried away talking about reporting)(Did you notice?)

"
I have studied the new Reporting Matters report and find it very valuable for any company to learn and improve. Sustainability reports are meant to be used. To be used, they must be effective. Peter Bakker (WBCSD President and CEO) states in the introduction to Reporting Matters 2014 : "The end goal [of reporting] is concise corporate disclosure that brings together financial, environmental and social performance to reflect improved risk and performance management within companies, as well as to drive more accurate valuation of companies and improved allocation of capital market investments." Improving performance. Improving allocation of investments. That means change. Reporting both reflects and DRIVES change. 

Here is the key message I want to share with you today.

Reporting is seriously undervalued – the failure to capture the power of the reporting process to drive performance, engagement and empowerment is probably one of the biggest failures of business over the past 10 years. Let's face it. Whenever anyone talks about reporting, all you hear is groans and sighs. All people do is moan that their reports don't get read. Everyone talks about the cost and resources required for reporting but very few people actually refer to it as an investment. No-one smiles when they talk about reporting. Quite the opposite in fact. Mention sustainability report and people's jaws drop to the floor or they go into a deep coma. Hardly anyone actually says: "Wow, we derive real benefit from our sustainability reporting. It's a fantastic and fun activity. It's really worth our time and effort." 

So, how did that happen? How did we turn sustainability reporting into everyone's biggest headache? How is it that companies who are expert at squeezing every cent out of a capital investment get barely a quarter of the value from their report? Let me tell you why. It's because reporting is, sadly, very misunderstood. And who misunderstands reporting the most? Yes, you guessed it. Pretty much everyone. CEOs. Investor Relations folks. Managers. And, don't fall off your seat… Chief Sustainability Officers. Yes. Quote me on that. Chief Sustainability Officers don't understand reporting. Haha. I'll probably never work in this industry again, but what the heck. I can prove it. Just go back home to your workplace and see how many managers and employees know about your sustainability report and have actually taken an interest in any part of it. Call up any of your key suppliers and ask them if they have noticed your report. Talk to a few customers. See what they say. Ask your Sustainability Officers how many conversations they have had about their latest report with just about anybody. I am prepared to guarantee that, for most of you, the responses won't be very encouraging. 

So let me present another perspective. Sustainability Reporting has business value, it engages internal and external stakeholders, it empowers people and it's fun. Notice that I talk about reporting, not just reports. Because the PROCESS is just as important as the OUTPUT. What you do with the output is also part of the process. A Sustainability Report is made up of three parts: the preparation process, the publication and the engagement process following publication. Most people undervalue the first part, minimize the second part and completely ignore the third part. 

Sustainability Reporting has business value, it engages internal and external stakeholders, it empowers people and it's fun. 

Business value: The minute you follow a reporting framework, you are forced to think about issues in a different way. If you take a framework such as the GRI G4 framework, you are asked to give deep consideration to material impacts and the focus of your sustainability activities. The minute you publicly declare what's material, your paradigm of what you are doing, measuring and reporting changes. And when it does, you start to create a different kind of business value and business commitment. But only if you do this as a serious activity. If you just go through the motions, all you get is motions.

Engagement: The reporting process is a fantastic platform to engage internal and external stakeholders on what's important to them and their expectations of you. You may think you know. Maybe you do. But asking the questions creates ownership, partnership, commitment, motivation. Talking in a different way to stakeholders will deliver you a different kind of stakeholder relationship. 

Empowerment: I say that everyone engaged in the reporting process is empowered by it. Sustainability reporting is a way to bring people out of their regular activities, allow them to tell their stories, shine a little. With so many online platforms for reporting, employees are now even becoming movie stars .. reporting videos featuring employees are becoming much more popular. Take a CEO. CEOs have almost no involvement, I might say, even no ownership, for the reporting process. Most of them probably hardly even read their own opening statements. Yet, look what happens to a CEO when she has a great sustainability report to share … suddenly the CEO can join a conversation about sustainability, can showcase her organization on world stages, is seen as progressive or at least, legitimate. It's highly empowering for a CEO to be able to demonstrate – through a Sustainability Report – that her company is behaving in a sustainable manner. 

Don't let the technobabbling frameworks misguide you. Part of the headache around sustainability reporting is that we all think it's so complicated. GRI, SASB, CDP, Integrated Reporting… finding your way through a labyrinth of conflicting and disconnected guidance documents written in language that you need to be a professor of law to understand doesn’t really help anyone. But it's not that tough. Don’t let all these technobabblers derail you. It really is quite simple. Work out what your unique contribution to the world is. Define how you are materially impacting stakeholders. Prioritize. Act. Measure. Report. Engage. Voila. Don't let the framework builders define what's important for you. You have to do that yourself. Don't let SASB tell you biodiversity is important. Let your stakeholders tell you. Don’t let the Integrated Reporting framework scrunch up your brain with so many different capitals if they don't have meaning for you. Since when was a person "HUMAN CAPITAL"? How weird is that? Sustainability reporting in its simplest essence about the way your company impacts the world, how it measures and accounts for doing so. Doing it well adds value to your business, it's engaging, empowering and fun. 

Put comparability back in its box. One of the big dilemmas of course is how to tell who is better than the rest. We are all obsessed with ranking and ratings, and yes, wait for it, the Holy Grail of Comparability. Companies are competitive and sustainability is a competitive differentiator. GRI was set up with a goal (among others) of establishing comparability. It never worked. Even CDP, where the focus is on a single set of KPIs, I suggest, does not achieve true comparability. So you know that Company X has lower GHG emissions than Company Y. That single data-point is connected to so many other data-points that it's just not enough as a basis for making an informed decision about investing, buying from or working for that company, or allowing it into your neighborhood. I say comparability is a diversion. What we should be looking for is good process that delivers intended results and consistency over time that enables us to see how a company does better than itself. 

Consistency is the differentiator. Some of the best companies in this space are most respected because they demonstrate consistency over time. A single report is a drop in the ocean. Sustainability credibility is a series of action and reporting cycles over several years, where progress can be demonstrated. M&S and Plan A, Kingfisher and Net Positive, Patagonia and the Footprint Chronicles, Pepsico and Performance with Purpose, Nestle and Creating Shared Value, Unilever and the Sustainable Living Plan, Skanska and Deep Green, H&M and Conscious Fashion. The value in this program branding is its consistency year after year of delivering sustainability results. All these companies set multi-year targets and follow through, coming clean about where they are not delivering. 

Don't force it (all). I am often asked about mandatory reporting. Should all companies of a certain size be FORCED to report and FORCED to report the same things? There is no doubt that voluntary reporting has not evolved as a universally accepted norm in a consistent way. There is also no doubt that legislation changes the way companies behave. The Denmark report or explain experience caused more companies to report and some to actually derive benefit from it. In an ideal world, companies would want to use reporting to derive the value it brings for their companies. However, there's something else. If we believe that reporting has value and is a catalyst for performance improvement, why would governments not be more interested in having companies do things that will help them create performance improvement? It's in the economic, social and environmental interest of governments to have more companies report, and use the output to drive allocation of resources and plan future infrastructure. I therefore believe that governments should mandate sustainability reporting of policy, process and a  set of core indicators that should be disclosed by all companies. Exactly what and how companies report this and more can be discretionary. Those companies who, as now, see it as valuable will invest more and derive more value from it. Those who want to tick the box will do the minimum and get the minimum in return. But as a minimum, governments are also accountable for corporate impacts and should legislate to know what they are dealing with. 

Reports are people. Legislation alone is not going to make the transformation here. Companies are. CEOs are. People are. Stakeholders are. Sustainability reporting is one of the tools that can help this transformation. Rounding off, my message is that Sustainability Reporting has business value, it engages internal and external stakeholders, it empowers people and it's fun. If you approach reporting with this mindset, you will be amazed at what reporting can do for your business and for your stakeholders. You might even find it raises a smile. Or two.

"

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting  AND  Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via Twitter (@elainecohen)  or via my business website www.b-yond.biz   (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm).  Check out our G4 Report Expert Analysis Service - for published G4 reports or pre-publication - write to Elaine at info@b-yond.biz to help make your G4 reporting  even better.