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Communicate! Part 2
The corporate responsibility report and beyond
This chapter covers planning and execution of the essential forms of written communication for corporate responsibility as well as social media, audio, and video formats.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing (Benjamin Franklin).
Like spoken communication, writing is a critical tool in the corporate treehugger toolbox. Most people will be more comfortable with either spoken or written communication, but it is important for your success in this field to be good at both.
Types of corporate responsibility communication
In today’s corporate responsibility departments, there are several common forms of written communication. Figure 5 outlines some of the major forms of written corporate responsibility communications as a function of the depth of their content and the frequency of delivery.
Figure 5 Frequency vs. depth of corporate responsibility communications
The corporate responsibility report
The classic form of written communication for the corporate treehugger is the annual corporate responsibility report. The production of these reports has spawned an entire industry for communications agencies and a substantial number of jobs for corporate treehuggers. Over the last ten years, the number of corporate responsibility reports filed with the Global Reporting Initiative has increased by 300% and most of the largest firms as tracked by the Fortune 500® now file some form of responsibility report.68
There is a huge amount of information and detail in these reports and every year the level of disclosure is increasing. Both Intel and AMD (my former and current employers) started publishing public reports in 1995, long before it was common practice. Back then, these were known as environmental reports, which went into the details of air, water, and waste emissions as well as any voluntary efforts to improve the environment.
Over the years, stakeholders who wanted to know more about the company’s operations and policies demanded additional information. In the late nineties, the Boston-based nonprofit Ceres started the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which issued its first GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines in 1999. As of this writing, the GRI is on its third major revision of the guidelines (the GRI G3 and G3.1) and is well on the way to issuing a fourth. The GRI guidelines have become a de facto international standard for the issuance of “non-financial” or “environmental and social governance (ESG)” reports. More recent versions of the guidelines incorporate an “application level,” which is a self-assessment of the degree to which you answered all the questions in the guideline. Letter grades (either A, B, or C) are assigned based on how many of the “core” and “non-core” indicators are covered in your report. You can get a “+” added to your grade if you have your report audited by a third party.
Each GRI guideline revision has added additional indicators that should be included with your report. There are now approximately 125 different data points in the GRI G3 guidelines covering detailed information in the following areas:
• Vision and strategy
• Organizational profile
• Report profile
• Governance
• Economic performance
• Social performance
• Human rights
• Society
• Product responsibility
Obviously, it is a significant amount of work to collect, verify, and report all of this information. In addition to reporting on the GRI information, most corporate responsibility reports are also a significant marketing document for the company. This means that you must develop storylines, create graphics, acquire images (with copyrights), and pull all of this together into a compelling report that complies with your company’s brand guidelines. This is an important opportunity because CR reports are not only a wonderful way to represent your company’s good work to he outside world, but also a source of pride for your company’s employees across the globe.
Annual CR reports are an important element of any corporate responsibility program. Given the large scale and scope of these reports, it is very likely that you will be involved in the creation of these reports at some point in your career as a corporate treehugger. Below are a few tips for planning and creating a corporate responsibility report.
The hidden value of corporate responsibility reports
At the 2010 Ceres conference there was an award ceremony for the year’s best CR reports. In accepting the award in the small and medium business category, the representative from Seventh Generation asked the audience how many people had read its report. Very few hands went up. Then he asked how many people had read their company’s report. Almost all the hands went up. The next award winner was Ford Motor Company. During his acceptance speech, the Ford representative said that the process of pulling together its sustainability report was instrumental in driving programs within Ford. He said the reporting deadlines impelled departments within Ford to launch programs and/or collect data that would likely not have happened without this forcing function.
These two award-winning companies were publicly admitting that the main value in producing their CR reports was not transparency (i.e., a window on company operations), but a driver for company awareness and action (i.e., a mirror for employees to evaluate and enhance their corporate responsibility actions). Few people will invest the time to read a CR report unless it has direct impact on them. In the age of instant information, if we want data on a particular issue, we don’t sit down to read a report, we “Google” or “Bing” it so we can read a summary. This means that perhaps only a handful of people have read your CR report cover to cover, and most of those people are probably company employees.
Determine your format
The first step is to decide the format for your report. In the early days, most companies published printed reports and physically distributed them to their stakeholders. Since printing thousands of copies of a lengthy report can be a waste of resources, most companies have evolved to other formats. The most common format in use today is to develop a corporate responsibility website and append the full annual report as a downloadable file.
The website may capture abbreviated versions of the same content in the annual report, but can also include unique and timelier content such as blogs, tweets, or videos. The full annual report is like a complete record of your company’s performance for the past year. Because the scope of these reports has grown so large (along with the page count), some companies have developed a “report builder” function that allows the stakeholders to select only the sections of interest for download.
In addition to the Web and downloadable version of the annual report, many companies also develop a short summary in a printed brochure to use as a handout with certain audiences. Once you determine which combination of these formats you will use, you can outline a project plan. Each of the formats involves a different set of specialties (Web, graphics, layout, video, print, copywriting, etc.) that will have to be brought into the project team.
Start early
These reports are a massive effort. For example, AMD publishes its report in early May. The team assembles to start the process in November. As the project unfolds, there are upwards of a dozen staff working on the report and a dedicated, full-time team leader. While the company has not counted the man-hours dedicated to this report, all told, I would estimate it is well over 1,000. If your company has done a report in the past, you can look back at the business processes from the prior reports and simply update these. Start by asking your internal stakeholders about what worked well and what did not. For example, you may find out that your last report was issued late, had data gaps, or ran into approval or branding problems. Take stock of the issues and begin planning your schedule, budget, and process improvements early on. Most reports are issued in the first quarter or early second quarter of the company’s fiscal year in order to coincide with the company’s annual meeting. To meet this schedule, you have to start planning early in the fourth quarter. If your company is on a calendar year, this can be difficult because the fourth quarter is full of other demands as well as holidays. Even if you can only get the team together once or twice, it is far better to have started in the fourth quarter than showing up in January and trying to sort it all out.
Form a team
Start planning your CR report by outlining roles and responsibilities for each of the major internal stakeholders. In Chapter 2 we talked about “leading through influence” and “reading the system.” These skills become paramount here, because you will be asking people to do a lot of work for this report, and they need to see the value that justifies their effort.
Collecting the data you need is the first step. If your company is already in the rhythm of doing an annual report, it is likely that you will already have a network of data providers identified from all of the relevant departments. In these cases, the effort can be described as an “update” of last year’s report.
As you contact colleagues to request the needed data, you will likely encounter reactions ranging from eager to reluctant. Ideally, the departments providing data for the annual report will own their section and take pride in telling their part of the CR story. If this is the case, your role is to manage the overall structure and production of the report. Most likely, it will be a mixed bag: you will end up developing almost all of the content for some sections and very little for other sections.
When working on a corporate responsibility report, you will likely encounter “silo behavior,” where people only relate to the issues within their own department (silo) and don’t readily share information with others. When you encounter reluctance (e.g., ignored calls, unanswered e-mails, missed deadlines, or blown-off meetings), set a meeting with the leaders of the department along with your own management. Discuss why the report has value to all involved and strive to define a point of contact and a deadline for delivering the needed information. If this does not work, you can continue to escalate up the management chain or simply go forward without the information. It is probably better to take a hit on your GRI scores than cause a feud between your group and another business team.
Start with the GRI
Many of the reports I have worked on did not follow this simple rule: start with the GRI. What happened in these cases is that we scrambled after the report was essentially done to figure out how we could fill all of the gaps in the required GRI data. It is far better to start with the GRI guidelines as the format for the request to your data providers.
Get the latest version of the guidelines and split them up into sections that are relevant to your company’s structure. If you have reported in the past, create a table that shows the data from the last report and adds a column for them to fill in for the current reporting year. In the same request, you should ask your data providers for stories and anecdotes about major changes or achievements in their department. For example, the community affairs department will report the number of volunteer hours and can also provide you with great stories of individuals or groups who have volunteered in their communities. In some cases, these departments will want to draft these stories themselves; in other cases, you can interview people to gather the stories.
At the end of the report, you should publish a GRI index. This is an index of each GRI indicator, whether you reported it fully, partially, or not at all, and where it can be found in the report. From the index, you can derive your grade or “application level” and publish this as well. Finally, if you use a third-party firm to assure your data, you will include a statement from that firm detailing its assurance process and findings.
Create a master plan
As you can tell from the pages above, the CR report is a major endeavor. It cannot be done without assembling a team of people to acquire the data, create the creative layout, develop graphics, Web programming, brand compliance, images, copywriting, editing, and legal review, etc. As you set out your project plan, you will need to figure out where each of these services will come from. It is like being the general contractor for building a house – you will need to arrange for the carpenters, plumbers, and roofers, etc. to perform their trade in the right sequence so that the whole project comes out on time and on budget.
Because the corporate responsibility report is a ubiquitous communication tool and can be the top priority of the corporate responsibility department, condensed below are ten steps to help plan your corporate responsibility report:
1. Decide on deliverables (Web, PDF, brochures, printed reports, etc.) and the deadlines for each
2. Outline the sections of the report based on the GRI guidelines (specifically create a table that accounts for where each of the GRI indicators will appear in the report)
3. Define your network of data providers
4. Define your network of service providers for copy, Web, layout, images, graphics, and print as appropriate
5. Create a master schedule with milestones for:
– Data and story acquisition
– Copywriting and editing
– Web design and programming
– Layout, images, and graphics for Web, PDF, and print
– Reviews by appropriate executives
– Reviews by legal (and brand conformance, if needed)
6. Define your budget and allocate resources to each function
7. Define a schedule for each function that sequences the activities by their dependencies (e.g., the raw data is needed before the story and copy can be created; or management review must occur before legal review, etc.)
8. Schedule a kickoff meeting with the full team to get buy in to your schedule and budget and make any needed changes
9. Schedule team meetings at a regular cadence throughout the project
10. Make sure to recognize the team when then project is completed
In many cases, companies outsource some or all of these functions to a communications agency. Even in these cases, you will need to develop a plan to gather all of the information needed for the report, provide project oversight, and manage all of the needed internal reviews.
Beyond the corporate responsibility report
It’s May. You just spent a third of your year working on the annual CR report. Your reward? More communications …
In the Internet age, annual corporate responsibility reports are too slow to be sufficient as your only means of communication. While the annual report is a critical document to establish the record of your performance and goals, your stakeholders want more frequent and timely communication.
Not too long ago, corporate communications mainly consisted of professionally written press releases that were reviewed by subject matter experts, executives, and legal counsel then issued to wire services and relevant publications. These press releases could take days or even weeks to produce. Today, most corporate communications departments have one or more Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts and a few blog feeds that are updated in real time. Continuous and instant corporate communications are now a fact of life.
The expectation for continuous fresh content has rewritten the rules for corporate communications, including corporate responsibility. Most leading CR departments are now producing an annual report as well as a variety of additional communications that are issued on a more frequent cadence:
Newsletters
Several leading corporate responsibility departments are issuing newsletters that are published more frequently than the annual report. For example, AMD issues a “corporate responsibility update.” This publication is an e-newsletter format issued in the summer and fall of each year (the annual report is typically in the spring). AMD uses this publication to update its stakeholders on progress across a broad range of issues, and it also features an in-depth look at a specific CR program. These updates are a great way to rotate through the initiatives within your program’s scope, not only to keep your stakeholders informed, but also to engage your business partners by spotlighting their activities and accomplishments.
Another advantage of issuing more frequent updates is creating the distribution list of interested stakeholders. Along with your Twitter and Facebook followers, this list forms part of the stakeholder community for your program. Avoid spamming this community by allowing them to both opt in and opt out of the list.
Blogs
Many leading CR sites feature a blog feed. Blogs are both a blessing and a curse. They are a blessing because you can issue information on a frequent basis, cover a broad scope of issues, and feature bloggers from the major functions within your company. Blogs can become a curse because of the amount of work it takes to keep them fresh and on message.
Here are a few steps to manage a corporate responsibility blog:
• Identify your bloggers. Make the rounds of the major contributing departments (EHS, HR, legal, etc.) and ask them to identify people who will write blogs to become official bloggers for the CR blog feed. Set up a “meet the bloggers” link with a headshot and quick bio and provide each blogger with either editing or access to ghostwriting to ensure that you get consistent quality and delivery for your blog feed
• Calendar your blogs. Develop a calendar of all the topics and bloggers that you can forecast and assign them an owner and a due date to make sure that the content is delivered
• Establish a process. Set out a review process for your blog posts including your communications and legal team and establish a regular meeting to review the blog calendar (suggest biweekly) to stay on track and adjust to new developments as needed. Although this will not be appropriate for every topic, try to post your blogs on other sites in addition to your corporate website. For example, GreenBiz.com, Sustainable Life Media (sustainablebrands.com/sustainablelifemedia), 3blmedia.com, csrwire.com, and others are great outlets for good content. Posting to a well-known CR site will guarantee that you will get more visibility. Be selective on the blogs that you promote for external sites – they should lean toward more cutting-edge themes as opposed to promoting your company’s programs.
Social media
Twitter and Facebook have already changed corporate communications in profound ways and these changes are still rapidly evolving. On the plus side, social media provides a forum for an ongoing dialogue with a self-identified group of people who are interested in the company’s messages. On the flipside, social media can be a black hole for fresh content with little time for preparation or review. The analogy is the ravenous carnivorous plant Audrey II in the movie Little Shop of Horrors that keeps screaming, “Feed me, Seymour!”
• Coordinate with corporate communications. Work with your corporate communications team to set up your Twitter handle and your Facebook site. It is likely that your company already has a social media presence. It may or may not make sense to house your corporate responsibility messages on the company’s main Facebook site. Unless you work for one of the “epiphany” companies described earlier (companies that are founded on sustainability as a central tenet), your audience is likely to be somewhat different than the audience for your mainstream corporate messages. This is not to say that you should not cross-post these messages, but in many cases, it makes sense to have a separate social media presence for the corporate responsibility function. Your followers will appreciate a more focused stream of communications about topics that are more relevant to them
• Develop a process. You will need to assign certain people to have access to your social media accounts and develop a system for accountability. While you will not always have time to review them, every tweet and Facebook post is a voice representing your company. The best way to manage in this paradigm is to restrict access to only a few accountable people who have been trained in media relations, understand corporate responsibility content, and are in the loop for corporate position statements (in some companies managing social media channels has been defined as a full-time role)
• Do it daily. Static social media defeats the purpose and will work against the credibility of your program as your followers begin to check out. If you are going to enter the social media world, you have to keep up a steady stream of communications. To do this, the people you have assigned to update your social media accounts should be the “plugged-in types” (typically the ones who send a lot of e-mails with interesting links and “FYI” in the subject line). Once recruited, these people should be running TweetDeck or HootSuite (these are programs that aggregate your social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and posting items of interest at least daily, if not several times a day. These folks should also monitor the feeds on hashtags related to your company, your priority topics, and any trending areas of interest. To do this does not require a lot of original content; retweets of interesting posts and articles are a great way to feed the pipeline by using nothing more than “check this out” as a lead
• Monitor your comments. The world of social media is a two-way conversation. Your followers will let you know what they think on a real-time basis. Continually monitor comments on your blogs, Facebook posts, direct mentions, and retweets on Twitter. It is a judgment call on when to respond to comments but avoid being drawn in by the “haters” who live on the Web and routinely post negative comments. The trick is to be able to discern real input and trends from the crackpots and spammers
• Special events. I recently watched a “CSR chat” by Best Buy (U.S. electronics retailer). The event was live-streamed video on the Web with a very active twitter hashtag. The Best Buy folks were able to tell their story and respond to questions from the Twitter feed. The comments and dialogue from the Twitter followers were universally positive with one tweet exclaiming that the event raised the bar for sustainability communications. Any time that you can involve your followers in an interactive forum like this, you get a rich mix of feedback and more people learning about your CR story. Other companies have held contests or created interactive applications as a way to connect with their consumers on corporate responsibility themes. For example, Timberland’s Earthkeepers Virtual Forest promotion on Face-book allows fans to plant a virtual forest and watch it grow. The promotion was so successful that Timberland had to shut it down temporarily when it ran short of tree seedlings
• Stay current. Just a few years ago, Facebook was only for college kids and Twitter did not exist. Now, every communications department has a social media strategy dealing with these channels
• Add a CR-focused approach. Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are terrific social media channels for all interests, but there are a growing number of online communications channels that are exclusively focused on corporate responsibility. Triple Pundit, Triple Bottom Line (or 3BL, which recently acquired JustMeans.com), CSRwire, GreenBiz.com, Environmental Leader, Vault.com, Treehugger.com, and ethicalcorp.com are all examples of the special interest channels that you can use to ensure your messages are shared within the CR community
Audio and video
Audio and video files are becoming increasingly important communication vehicles. Short video clips and podcasts can be shared through your social media accounts and websites. Many companies also have a YouTube channel to feature their latest video clips.
Obviously, audio and video are more technically challenging and require specialists who can produce, tape, and edit content into a compelling piece. A few tips for working with audio and video are:
• Manage the content. With some experience, you can become adept at the video medium so that you can manage the message. Don’t feel intimidated if you have not worked in this medium before. Like other formats, it is essential to convey your message to the target audience in a clear, concise, and memorable way. With video and audio content, you will need to assemble an outline or script with short soundbites from subject matter experts, B-roll (background video with voiceover), and professional voiceover narration. If your company has a studio, you can work with them or hire an external communications agency to produce your video
• Keep it short. Long videos or podcasts of corporate communications can be boring. Less is more when it comes to this form of communication. You need to define one or two key messages and stay focused on these. The rule of thumb is to shoot for about two minutes – much longer than two minutes and you risk losing your audience
• Keep it interesting. Avoid making videos that are overly promotional about your company – these can come across like selling timeshares. If you want to capture hearts and minds, stay humble and focus on topics that have general interest. You will be able to weave in your company’s message but it should be within the context of an issue that has broader appeal. For example, if your company is working on a controversial issue like eliminating sweatshop labor in your supply chain, frame your company’s actions around general information on the topic
Pulling it all together
Throughout this book, I have pointed to communications skill as one of the most important attributes for the corporate treehugger. Today’s corporate responsibility group is like a mini-newsroom. You must be up to speed on the latest developments internal and external to your company and constantly communicating in multiple formats and venues.
You have to not only be able to create the story, but also be competent enough to tell the story in a compelling way.
A common communication mistake is to over-communicate. “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”: this quote is a fantastic reminder that it takes preparation and planning to deliver concise, compelling messages that will resonate with your intended audience. The take-home message in all of these tips is that communication in all of its forms is a defined, learnable, and essential skill for the corporate treehugger. Like mastering any skill, it takes practice, coaching, perseverance, and patience. Mastering this skill, however, pays huge dividends. Communications is a portable skill that can be put to good use in almost any career choice and is arguably the single most important attribute for your success.