Telling the story beyond your sustainability report
With the end of “reporting season” — the period between January and June when most sustainability reports are created — fast approaching, corporate sustainability professionals are breathing a collective sigh of relief.
As a former journalist, the process of creating sustainability reports has always fascinated me. In many ways, it feels like co-writing a book with dozens of disparate co-authors and editors under the gun of unreasonable timelines — only to produce a tome that few will ever lay eyes on.
For the uninitiated, creating a sustainability report typically entails the following:
Spending many months wrangling an exorbitant amount of environmental, social and governance information from across the business;
Distilling this into a coherent narrative that fits into a PDF ranging from twenty to one hundred pages;
Aligning the report to a major reporting framework, such as Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), Task Force on Climate-Related Disclosures (TCFD), etc.;
Visualizing ESG data and laying all of this content out in an interesting design; and,
Socializing the report internally to ensure it is approved by multiple stakeholders — and particularly legal.
Just writing all of that is making my blood pressure spike. Deep breaths.
As you might have guessed, this is too much for in-house corporate sustainability folks to handle alone — which more often than not necessitates bringing on consultants such as myself to help with report strategy, writing and design. And even with consultant support, creating a sustainability report is an exhausting endeavor.
Companies often fall into a cycle of spending half a year producing them and the other half trying to forget the experience — and then right back to it. But letting a company’s sustainability storytelling fizzle in the “reporting off season” is a major lost opportunity — both for advancing social and environmental progress and building brand equity through compelling communication.
Reports aren’t enough
Nearly every major company is now producing sustainability reports — or will be soon. As much as 96 percent of the S&P 500 and 81 percent of Russell 1000 companies are publishing sustainability reports, according to the Governance & Accountability Institute. And to comply with new legislation like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), many privately held businesses are beginning their sustainability reporting journey.
As I wrote in GreenBiz last year: “More quality reporting on corporate sustainability performance is a good thing. But when it comes to communicating sustainability, reporting simply isn’t enough.”
In the piece, I reference a 2023 survey that found 96 percent of senior executives say it's important to share sustainability stories, and nearly half (45 percent) believe their companies aren’t talking enough about those initiatives. Since then, many more companies have begun resorting to greenhushing in response to fears of being labeled as “woke” by the anti-ESG forces on the right and being criticized for not doing enough by some extreme voices on the left — but that doesn’t mean companies are off the hook for communicating sustainability.
While investors and regulators may be satisfied with reporting and disclosures, this isn’t what consumers, customers, employees and the general public are reading. New research from Deloitte shows we may be approaching a “tipping point where sustainability will be considered a baseline requirement for purchase, and companies should prepare now.”
According to the research, trust drives behavior and, ultimately, business outcomes; sustainability promotes trust, particularly among younger generations; and younger generations will soon have most of the purchasing power in the United States.
The takeaway: Companies failing to tell authentic, compelling and consistent sustainability stories are going to fall behind.
Incentivizing sustainability storytelling
A lack of incentives is a major reason why many companies don’t tell sustainability stories outside of reports.
Communication isn’t usually in the sustainability team’s remit — and performance is measured based on publishing the report versus advancing corporate marketing goals. Likewise, corporate communication and marketing teams typically aren’t evaluated on how many sustainability stories they tell in a given year. It follows that many sustainability professionals lack strong communication chops — while marketing and communications professionals don’t have sustainability expertise.
But what makes sense at the individual level might be madness at the organizational level. Effective communication helps companies achieve sustainability goals by educating and mobilizing stakeholders into taking necessary actions. Likewise, improving communicators’ comprehension of social and environmental topics allows them to weave sustainability into their broader business narrative.
Creating a ‘closeness’ between sustainability and communication teams
One of the ways companies overcome this dilemma is by working to develop a “closeness” between sustainability and communication teams, Raheem Cash, VP of Corporate Sustainability at Moody’s Corporation, told me during a recent episode of The Sustainability Communicator podcast.
“One thing that I've liked the most about my experience at Moody's so far is the strength of and the closeness between sustainability and communications — and that's not something that you often see.
It allows the sustainability team to communicate their perspective with respect to these various issues,” he said.
“And I have found that I'm working with communication folks who have an understanding of the approach and strategy that we have as a company towards sustainability. And that in turn has meant that they're able to come up with potential ideas on communicating — even in some cases changing the way they've done things previously because they now have an understanding of the direction we're going in and the approach that we want to take.”
While this doesn’t mean organizing your sustainability team under the marketing department, companies should make sure that their sustainability and communication teams know each other. The next level up would be ensuring enough collaboration to fold sustainability communication strategy into the company’s broader marketing and communication plan — and ensuring that the company’s communicators have that closeness with the sustainability function. Likewise, the better sustainability folks can understand the objectives of the marketing and communication function, the more helpful they can be.
In the best case, the company hires a full-time sustainability communication lead. And — pardon the plug — a company can always work with a fractional sustainability communication executive like myself to help translate between sustainability and communication teams.
What could be
A world where sustainability and communication teams work closely together is one where there is both less greenhushing and greenwashing. Companies infuse sustainability into their marketing strategy and brand identity, which in turn helps sustainability remain central to business strategy.
In this world, companies would put out sustainability content year-round — from blog posts and social copy to videos and internal newsletters. They would have clear messaging around sustainability, with all claims backed up by data. And the companies would have the courage to talk about their wins as well as failures.
All of this would help engage internal and external stakeholders to take the decisive actions needed for companies to achieve sustainability goals. Because while we have many of the tools and solutions needed to decarbonize the world and address many social and environmental challenges — we lack the ability to take collective action at scale.
Effective sustainability communication is how we’ll get there.
This article originally appeared in the ENGAGE newsletter on May 14, 2024. Subscribe to the newsletter here.
