Online Sustainability Reporting: Brick Walls Behind Open Doors? Edging towards CSR 2.0

 

I saw a tweet from @derekabdinor the other day that intrigued me, so I went to check out the Jungle Rating site. The consultancy has just published ratings which aim for a view of how firms included on the DJSI STOXX Dow Jones sustainability index perform in online sustainability reporting. The idea is to create a benchmark consisting of 125 research criteria.

The outright winner was BASF.

BASF publishes topical information (news and case study updates) and offers complete GRI-based performance information, very useful for the professional user groups (socially responsible investors and analysts).

The website also contains several unique features, such as case study videos, flash animations, downloadable Excel sheets and interactive graphs.”

interactivity, programmability, and more open data. Makes sense.

The next companies on the list were BHP Billiton, Centrica, Novo Nordisk & BP.

Gas and utility companies-the usual regulated industry suspects for CSR PR. I need to spend some time checking out the DJSI SToXX index. I must admit I was pretty surprised not to see BT on list, given that its a European company I rate highly on sustainability action and reporting.

Meanwhile seeing BP on the list also made me think-not because of its sustainability reporting capabilities, but simply because I think BP talks the talk, but doesn’t walk it. The Lord Brown era was an era of deceit: all mouth and very short trousers from a sustainability perspective. Beyond Petroleum- yeah, right. Tell it to Alaska or Texas.  Lauding BP for its online carbon calculator seems a bit pointless. After all-there are already a surfeit of such calculators out there. Carbon calculators are table stakes not differentiators.

I spent yesterday in Berlin with Transparency International, which got me thinking about the difference between PR and a real commitment to sustainability.

The ticklist means nothing. Videos and “web 2.0′ features can obscure, rather than enable, transparency. Peter Wilkinson, a consultant working with TI, told me a brilliant story over dinner about a famous London lawyer who, having been refused permissionto build a garage extension to his house, spent time poring over the relevant statutes, and then went ahead with his new garage anyway. It turned out that as long as the structure had doors on all four sides planning permission was not actually required. Of course if you opened any of the doors on three sides of the building all you found behind them were brick walls. If that isn’t a brilliant metaphor for tick-list corporate social responsibility (CSR) I don’t know what is. All the reports and funky web sites in the world won’t create a real commitment to sustainability.

Or will they? Its kind of hard not to “inhale” when you’re smoking CSR dope. Much as with open source there is a disruption associated with adopting new approaches.

I would like to see an index correlating true CSR responsibility with best in class reporting. Perhaps a future version of XBRL can help with that…True benchmarking. But in the shorter term it seems Jungle has a point. The transition from CSR brochureware to interactive read/write CSR platforms mirrors the transition we’ve seen on the web. With full awareness of the potential danger of using the term I am tempted to tag the new approach CSR 2.0.

I am not the only one thinking this way.

The web offers a chance to put the social in corporate social responsibility. 

Geert Jan Grimberg, internet consultant at Jungle Rating, says:

“the best performers provide complete and topical information, but also make use of the unique possibilities the web offers in terms of multimedia (e.g. video, rich internet) and personalisation (e.g. interactive graphs, downloadable Excel sheets)”. Very few companies use their corporate website to facilitate a stakeholder dialogue, by means of a weblog or periodical chat sessions.”

Dialogue, markets as conversations. Jungle makes some forecasts based on its research:

1. Disclosing topicalities, statements and opinions: Companies use their corporate website more and more to inform stakeholders on topical matters both within their company and in the broader environment (industry / politics).
2. Creation of an online stakeholder experience: The last years, wave riders have started to experiment with the use of multimedia (images, video and rich internet) on their corporate website and within the sustainability section.
3. Taking into account individual stakeholder preferences: many techniques are available to personalise information for specific needs, some front runners for example offer alert functionalities, interactive charts and/or podcasts (downloadable audio files) within their online sustainability section.
4. Establishing an online stakeholder dialogue: Although by far omnipresent yet, some companies start to make use of the various possibilities the internet offers to get a discussion with stakeholders going (e.g. chat, weblog, polls).

All good motherhood and apple crumble. For me its all about point 4, the conversations between corporations and multiple stakeholders. The fact only 17 out of the 53 firms studied were willing to discuss their efforts with Jungle indicates we have a long way to go. Real leaders are building structures with doors and windows, that allow stakeholders through the corporate membrane.

 

Thanks to SideLong for the use of the photo above.

 

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