Sustainability Reports Trend Briefing

Sustainability Reports

A sustainly Trend Briefing

Introduction

Sustainability Reports - A Sustainly Trend Briefing

“It’s all in our Sustainability Report” That’s a phrase guaranteed to strike fear in the hearts of even the hardiest sustainability wonks never mind the faint-hearted collective of investors, journalists and the public.

The fact is, companies keep packaging their diligent, necessary and informative sustainability reporting in dense corporate documents that no-one cares to read, including the sustainability professionals in their own organisation. All too often, large amounts of time, money and employee goodwill is spent on a document that gets filed deep down in some office filing cabinet or, in the online equivalent - 10 subpages down a company’s corporate website.

This is an opportunity lost because the information that sits within all sustainability reports is a potential goldmine for interacting with real people and demonstrating to them what many still have a hard time believing - namely that companies are making concrete efforts to make their

operations sustainable and to make products and services that put the needs of the consumers first.

Rather than looking at sustainability reports as the dull but worthy end result of a lengthy research process companies should consider their reports as the raw materials for great storytelling. Take that environmental data and repackage it to meet the interests and needs of non-sustainability experts. Evaluate all the feedback about the company’s social commitments and create real human stories. Overall, analyze the hard data and anecdotal evidence that has been compiled and use it in more creative, engaging ways to demonstrate the company’s commitment and authenticity.

In this latest Sustainly Trend Briefing we look at 10 examples of companies who are finding creative and informative ways to liberate the content in their sustainability reports and share them with the public.

sustainability Reports - A Sustainly Trend Briefing

It is not surprising that Adobe, one of the world’s leading creative software companies has played to its strengths for its annual sustainability performance. For its 2013 CR report, Adobe created an elegantly designed interactive report. Highlighting data from the past five years, the report shows key milestones such as LEED certification using interactive data to illustrate their progress.

The report paints a picture of Adobe’s priority areas (Global Giving, Youth Voices, Sustainability and Waste reduction) and allows the reader to dig deeper into the facts and figures behind each statistic. By creating an online experience that people can explore, Adobe has invited the audience in, creating what feels like a transparent reporting process. Moreover, figures that could very easily bore readers, like the percentage decrease in Scope 1 Co2 emissions, are brought to life by layers of vibrant colours and numbers showing comparative data from previous years.

Adobe

sustainability Reports - A Sustainly Trend Briefing

Apple, like many technology companies, has a lot to be accountable for with the amount of metal mining and the energy intensive manufacturing process of electronics. To make their Environmental Responsibility report widely available, the tech giant created an environment section within its website to house performance data and targets for reducing their impact on the environment.

Famously acclaimed as one of the best design companies in the world, there is the expectation that all things that come from Apple HQ will be beautifully designed with the user experience in the forefront. Their CSR report supports this. Using motion graphics and big, bright visuals, Apple shares its efforts of reducing waste, water and energy in their operations and outlines their future ambitions.

As with everything Apple does its report is minimalist, engaging and accomplished.

Apple

sustainability Reports - A Sustainly Trend Briefing

Mars Inc, whose portfolio of brands includes snickers, M&Ms and more, wanted to show stakeholders where its chocolate comes from, where it’s made, how it’s certified and ultimately how it gets to your mouth. As part of its 2012 sustainability report Mars created an interactive cocoa supply chain to show how all the pieces fit together.

Each part of the ‘Cocoa Supply Chain’ is engaging, where more information appears once clicked. As you move between parts of the chain, various coloured lines appear showing how different areas are connected, like farmers and local buyers.

Understanding how a supply chain works is a difficult message to communicate but Mars has managed to deconstruct this is a way thats easy to follow. Statistics about the five million farmers who harvest cocoa really shed some light on the sheer scale and amount of steps needed to bring chocolate to consumers. This also highlights where there are areas for improvement in sustainability efforts.

Mars Inc.

sustainability Reports - A Sustainly Trend Briefing

In 2012 Canadian Paper manufacturer Domtar, took a unique approach to communicating the sustainability journey of its primary product.

Domtar created the Paper Trail, which it refers to as ‘the industry’s most transparent resource calculator’. There are three options when you land on the page: Where does my paper come from? Calculate my environmental impact, and ‘Why this matters’ By choosing ‘Where does my paper come from’, readers can select from a drop down list any Domtar product to find out its origin, including the mill the paper comes from and the mill’s history and sustainability projects.

Domtar’s use of its product to show breakdown of environmental impact makes it much easier to understand CSR endeavours than figures of carbon emissions or square footage of forests. It’s a powerful tool designed not only to show Domtar’s social and environmental impact, but for use by businesses and individuals so that they’re able to calculate their own impacts.

Domtar

sustainability reports - A Sustainly Trend Briefing

The FairPrice Cooperative is Singapore’s largest supermarket chain with more than 100 stores.

For its annual CSR report, FairPrice created a microsite to house content from four key areas of their business. Titled responsible retailing, community care, sustainable environment and wonderful workplace each section shows in detail FairPrice’s approach and targets, using a mix of visual references including photos, tables and graphs. Readers use the left hand navigation icons to jump to other sections or to see in depth case studies.

The microsite also serves as a community hub for FairPrice and also houses their CSR specific blog. Although posts are infrequent, the blog does share real stories about FairPrice’s participation in WWF’s Earth Hour and their employees volunteering experiences at the local animal shelter, adding a human feel to the site.

Fairprice

sustainability Reports - A Sustainly Trend Briefing

As far as experiences go, Japanese camera manufacturer Nikon has made its sustainability report an unforgettable one. Using detailed illustrations and motion graphics, Nikon has developed an ‘eco journey’ where the viewer can follow an animated character throughout various factories, fields and offices and learn about each place as they go.

The journey is a busy one, with several moving parts. Trucks, conveyor belts and even changes in the weather occur throughout. As you embark on the journey, there are various popups boxes that you can click on to find out more about Nikon’s environmental protection efforts. The popups all link out to the corresponding section of the CSR report where more detailed information is presented.

Nikon

sustainability reports - A Sustainly Trend Briefing

Patagonia is no stranger to receiving praise for its sustainability efforts. Care for the environment and social issues sits at the core of its business model. Therefore, reporting on social and environmental responsibilities is a prominent section of Patagonia’s website. It is an online space that takes stakeholders on a candid, authentic journey through the company’s practices.

Large, high resolution images take up nearly three quarters of a page in the social responsibility section, telling a story even before you scroll down for text to read. It is the honesty of the images, showing factory conditions, raw materials and production methods, that backs up Patagonia’s desire to be open about its operations and communicate this to customers.

By highlighting important messages from its CSR report and making these available to an online audience, Patagonia has set a standard of transparency that hopefully other companies will adopt.

Patagonia

Sustainability reports - A Sustainly Trend Briefing

Kingfisher, Europe’s largest home improvement retailer has a strong track record of managing social and environmental impacts. This commitment to sustainability is clear in its CSR reporting efforts.

Kingfisher published its 2013 report as an interactive PDF on its website. The table of contents outlines seven distinctive symbols that represent each section of the report. These icons form a permanent part of the PDF’s design, fixed at the bottom of each page. As a person scrolls through the report, there are links that take the reader out to sections of Kingfisher’s website. Additionally at the end of some paragraphs, where sections relate to other parts of the report, like packaging and Timber, the two parts are linked through text links.

Using this link functionality that can be built into PDF’s, Kingfisher has made it easy to jump between sections, exploring the report anyway readers would like, making the PDF feel more like a website than a document. Used this way, an interactive PDF can be a smart way of presenting dense information without the complexity of building a new microsite.

Kingfisher

sustainability reports - A Sustainly Trend Briefing

Consumer health company Johnson & Johnson has chosen to embed its Citizenship and Sustainability report and related activities into its main website. Out of the four tabs on the homepage, the third tab is ‘caring’ and this area houses over 40 small stories, each part a section of their Citizenship and Sustainability report. The stories cover a range of topics from emissions to sustainable products to corporate contributions.

Each story reads like a blog post and contains a combination of photos, infographics and images with accompanying text. To the right of each story, there’s a navigation bar that shows related stories so people can read other posts that may be of interest. What’s most impressive is the way that sustainability stories get pulled through to website’s homepage. By putting sections of the report as a main content block on their homepage, Johnson & Johnson demonstrates that sustainability is an important part of their business.

Johnson & Johnson

sustainability reports - A Sustainly Trend Briefing

In a move to be as transparent as possible about its supply chain and impact on both a country and a global scale, Nike launched a global manufacturing map, showing up-to-date data on every factory they have worldwide. Though manufacturing represents only a few pages of its responsibility report, Nike signposts readers to visit the map to learn more.

Readers can not only explore each factory’s stats, such as worker profiles and product type, all of the data also is exportable as a PDF or Excel document.

As more brands develop their sustainability communication strategies, it’s likely that many will refer to Nike’s manufacturing map as a benchmark of reporting excellence.

Nike

We believe a sustainability report should be the platform for authentic sustainability storytelling, and not just a corporate report that no-one reads.

We draw on the UN SDG framework to devise content strategy that delivers a readable and engaging sustainability report and provides storytelling opportunities for corporate communications, PR and marketing departments.

Sustainability report strategy

Sustainability Report

STEP 1 We develop content strategy that helps explain materiality issues & reporting through the

UN SDG goals

STEP 2 We write and edit the

sustainability report content

STEP 3 We adapt and create content for online and social media

audiences based on the sustainability report

Sustainly provides a research service and consultancy to help companies and agencies create intelligent sustainability communication and marketing.

To learn more about Sustainly, contact:

Matthew Yeomans - founder [email protected]

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