By Dave Carter
At Auditel, we’ve a number of years of experience in supporting businesses on their sustainability journeys – typically through helping businesses meet compliance standards like ESOS, CBAM, SECR but also around carbon management, decarbonisation strategies and Science Based Targets (SBTI).
For a lot of businesses however, a lighter approach is needed and we recognise that jumping straight into a carbon footprint isn’t always where a business is going to get the most value from starting their sustainability journey.
In these cases, a sustainability report can be an excellent starting point – creating a compelling narrative that explores how the business thinks about sustainability, what is in place today, where the business wants to go in the short/medium/long term and how it intends to get there.
What is a Sustainability Report?
A sustainability report is a document that shares data, insights and other non-financial information to stakeholders that typically covers three core areas across the companies on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impact.
The goal is to demonstrate transparency, accountability and progress toward sustainability goals.
Like most reports or disclosures, there is an emphasis on continual improvement, meaning that most organisations update (or produce new reports) on an annual basis – documenting their achievements, changes of focus and challenges over the past year.
At first glance, this might seem like a lot of work but, in reality, sustainability reporting offers a number of benefits that other sustainability topics / efforts or outputs don’t necessarily cover.
The Benefits of Sustainability Reporting
Sustainability reporting isn’t just about accountability. In a narrative format, it offers a real opportunity to create value, build trust and drive positive change.
Here are some of the key benefits:
1. Stronger Stakeholder Relationships: Transparency builds trust. By sharing accurate, honest and interesting information about your sustainability efforts, you strengthen relationships with customers, employees, investors and other stakeholders.
2. Improved Risk Management: The process of reporting helps you identify and address potential ESG-related risks, enabling you to develop strategies to mitigate them.
3. Competitive Advantage: Consumers, employees and investors are increasingly prioritising sustainability. A well-crafted report can help you stand out from competitors and appeal to these value-driven audiences.
4. Continuous Improvement & Ownership: Tracking and reporting on sustainability metrics encourages goal setting and fosters a culture of ongoing improvement. Importantly, it also drives agency and responsibility internally to ensure that progress is being made and realised.
5. Positive Impact: Sustainability reporting drives organisations to adopt and implement practices, values and behaviours which contribute to better outcomes – to customers, colleagues, society and the environment.
6. Regulatory Compliance: With a growing demand relating to UK ESG compliance such as ESOS (Energy Saving Opportunities Scheme), SECR (Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting) and EU regulations like CBAM (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism) and CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive), having one foot on the ladder can be a huge benefit for when the time comes to align to compliance structures.
Tips for Writing Your Sustainability Report
When we support clients in writing their sustainability reports, there are 4 key elements we focus on:
– Preparation & planning
– Honesty & integrity
– Storytelling & communication style
– Measure, manage & improve
Preparation and Planning
Before you start writing, it’s essential to lay the foundations. Here’s are some key considerations:
• Compliance vs Narrative: The first question you need to ask yourself is what style or type of report you intend on writing. Will you be producing a short report as a starting point to get the company moving on its ESG journey? Or do you have a need, depending on your company size, your clients or your industry to report to specific guidelines. Identify the approach that best applies to your needs.
• Assign a senior level owner: Sustainability reports are typically delivered by mid-level managers, but they will need support in order to deliver. Whilst this person will be responsible for creating the narrative and drafting the copy they will need executive support to drive progress. Without this, tasks like working cross-functionally to gather data, receive input from other teams and to get insights from other senior leaders on topics like wider business strategy, future projects and focus areas tend to become points of significant friction and capacity challenges
• Collect Data: A critical requirement for any report is empirical evidence. This forms the basis of the business being able to showcase the existing state of play, define metrics and data points that will be managed over time and highlight progress. It is therefore critical to understand what data exists currently in the business that talks to the topics being discussed within the report, what gaps there are and how this can be monitored and managed regularly.
Writing the Report
Once you’ve set the foundations for the report, identified your data and its sources and are ready to start, it’s time to turn it into a compelling narrative. Here’s how:
• Be Transparent and Honest: Authenticity is paramount. It might be uncomfortable, but stakeholders aren’t interested in reading reports that have been overtly written through the lenses of some rose-coloured spectacles. Acknowledge challenges and areas for improvement alongside your successes. This builds credibility, validity and keeps your audience engaged.
• Avoid Greenwashing: This is often over-egged but the most important thing to avoid claims of greenwash is to ensure claims are specific, truthful and validated by data.
• Keep It Simple and Structured: Whilst the report might be being written by someone au-fait with sustainability and knows things inside out – it should always be assumed the reader is coming from a place of being interested but not educated on the topic. Try to steer clear of acronyms (as much as possible), jargon or terminology that might not be clear to those not familiar. Clear, concise language, formatted in an easy-to-follow structure will help. Break up text with headings, subheadings and bullet points for easy navigation.
• Tell a Story: A good sustainability report should read like a biography – not a university textbook on astrophysics. It needs to be personable, relatable and interesting, backed by data (formatted in a visually attractive way – not tables or black and white charts). Use effective storytelling to help highlight the real-world impact of your efforts. You should be able to use snippets of your report to take and repurpose in other areas of the business – investor relations, marketing materials, sales collateral, on the website. If, as you’re reading your report, it isn’t looking like you’d want to do that with the content, it’s a good sign to pump the breaks and review why.
• Use Visuals: We might all have important jobs and big titles but that doesn’t mean we all enjoy reading academic peer reviewed papers. Make it visually attractive though the use of infographics, charts and professional design elements to make complex data more digestible and visually appealing.
• Highlight Stakeholder Engagement: Stakeholders aren’t just board members. Within a sustainability or an impact context, stakeholders include employees, suppliers, customers, clients and wider society. Show how you’ve involved, supported or benefitted these parties in the reporting. You’re unlikely to have all the data at your hands immediately so make sure you connect with these stakeholder groups through surveys, focus groups, interviews or any other feedback mechanisms that are appropriate.
• Set Future Goals: The report shouldn’t just focus on the current state of play. Great reports detail future plans, aspirations and targets. This not only helps readers understand the journey the business is on but also helps you to focus and prioritise activities in the coming year that will deliver the results needed.
• Review and Revise: Before hitting publish, it is important to have a round of reviews to ensure your report is accurate, coherent and free of errors. Consider seeking feedback from all involved stakeholders to ensure clarity and relevance. Importantly, this must be a ringfenced process. Feedback or review processes can easily become protracted in attempts to include all views and opinions. Should this be the case, the senior owner should be the ultimate arbiter.
Value Multipliers
Whilst writing the report is the central deliverable, what you do with it is just as important as how well it is written:
• Use Multiple Channels: Depending on your audience, ensure you’re sharing and communicating the report through the platforms and channels they use. Post about it on social media and add a new tab to your website on the business’ ESG ethos with a link to download the report. Also update sales materials and other marketing collateral etc.
• Integrate into Broader Communications: Double up by sharing key insights from your report into existing communications methods. Piggyback on any existing email newsletter communications, press releases, blog posts, investor relations and other internal updates to keep sustainability at the forefront of your corporate narrative.
• Engage Suppliers: One of the biggest challenges for businesses is engaging suppliers to join the sustainability journey. By sharing the report, as well as best practice, learnings and insights, it becomes that much easier for your value to chain to get onboard too. In turn, this becomes another feather in your cap, you can also talk about in the next update.
• Host Webinars or Events: Engage existing clients, prospective partners and employees by utilising your efforts to become thought leaders – building further trust, recognition and awareness.
Measure and Improve
As with all sustainability and ESG efforts, this is an ongoing process of iterative improvement. To that end there is little value in doing a great job in creating an excellent report one year, and then not following up on it the next. From an optics perspective, it is guaranteed to raise eyebrows and uncomfortable questions about the business’ commitment etc.
There are 3 mechanisms you should use for ongoing progress. Each year, your report should reflect progress and improvement. To ensure this happens:
• Assign an executive level owner. In the early days, some friction or challenge should be expected within the business. Teams can struggle to see why this is important to them or why they need to be involved and the business more broadly won’t have yet seen the value that reporting delivers. By assigning a senior leadership owner, you minimise the likelihood of challenges resulting in slow (or no) progress being achieved.
• Embed the key metrics you’re reporting on within the business as BAU. Incentivise teams to deliver improvements so that progress becomes a de facto outcome and not something that needs additional attention. Track engagement metrics, such as page visits, downloads and social media interactions.
• Invest in improving data and systems. Having information at your fingertips that doesn’t need excessive levels of administration or effort to collate makes measuring and managing progress infinitely less challenging.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, a well-crafted sustainability report is an incredibly powerful document.
Done correctly, it builds trust, energy, enthusiasm, drives change and can be the platform that the business needs.
Contact us today to schedule a free 30 minute ESG audit and take the first step toward writing your own report.
With Auditel as your partner, you’ll have the knowledge, tools, and support to navigate creating a sustainability report with confidence – avoiding the risk of greenwash, creating commercial opportunity and avoiding common errors.
For a free exploratory call, or to learn more, contact our ESG specialist Dave today at: dave.carter@auditel.co.uk.
