Jul 15 2010
Sustainability Communications Blunder #2 – Failure to Quantify
Failure to Quantify Performance
If you want your sustainability communications to be credible, quantify as much as possible. This means you should try to quantify your targets as well as your performance. How much was emitted, consumed or sent to landfill? How much was recycled or restored? How do you expect this to change in the future? What are the historical trends in these measures – positive and negative?
To many of us, this kind of information seems an obvious requirement. Yet a surprising portion of companies fail to include this information in their sustainability reporting. What are the consequences?
- A failure to communicate clearly defined, quantitative goals and performance can open your company to ridicule and accusations of greenwashing. And it’s not just a matter of attaching numbers to specific claims. It’s also a matter of attaching numbers to the right issues. Companies that lead in this area, consider the materiality of what they are tracking – both what is important to their stakeholders and the impacts on/by their company. (For example, see page 14 of Intel’s 2009 CSR report.)
- Not quantifying your disclosures will hurt your company’s ratings in all of the public ranking and rating systems. The Newsweek Green Rankings, the Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index, the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices, to name a few, examine your company’s quantitative statements when they rate your sustainability.
Avoid this blunder! Attach specific measures to your sustainability performance and goals.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Matthew Rochte, elaine cohen. elaine cohen said: RT @mrochte: #Sustainability Communications Blunder #2 – Failure to Quantify by @KJanowski http://bit.ly/dvyXEe #CSR [...]
Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed browsing your blog posts. In any case I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you write again soon!