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.

Tags: corporate sustainability, environmental reporting, LinkedIn, Sustainable Business

We’ve identified the six biggest blunders companies make in communicating their environmental sustainability efforts and impacts – in other words how they “step on the hoe” in talking about how green they are.  The first and most egregious of these blunders is a lack of substance to back up claims.

A study conducted in April 2009 by the “sins-of-greenwashing” agency, TerraChoice, found 2219 products in US and Canadian retail stores that made environmental claims or claimed to be “green” in some way.  Of those, only 25 were judged to live up to their claims.  (The evaluation criteria was based on best practices by the Federal Trade Commission and the TerraChoice Seven Deadly Sins of Greenwashing.)  Nearly 60% of the 1700 products evaluated in the US offered no proof of their environmental claims.

The lesson for companies:  Don’t overreach your data.  Don’t claim what you can’t support.  There’s no faster road to a loss of credibility.

Stay tuned for Blunder #2!

Tags: business benefits of going green, corporate sustainability, environmental reporting, Green Marketing, sustainability, Sustainability Communications, sustainability strategy, Sustainable Business

Sustainability gets communicated to the marketplace and your company’s stakeholders through many avenues.  We can think of these along a spectrum.  Just as with typical marketing communications, on the left end of this spectrum, company executives have less control or influence and there’s a progression from that to the other end of the spectrum where there’s a greater degree of control.

On the far right of this diagram, you can see that, among the methods over which you have the greatest control, is REPORTS.  Add this to the list of reasons for reporting cataloged in my post on Why Report!

Tags: businesses going green, corporate sustainability, environmental reporting, environmental sustainability, LinkedIn, sustainability strategy

I spend a lot of time considering  the ways in which companies communicate their sustainability efforts.  But before communication comes  data.   It can be challenging  for an organization to decide what environmental data to collect, and then how to analyze and convey it.   Also daunting is the choice of a  mechansm to collect and store the information:   A spreadsheet?  Collaboration tools?  Word?   This article from BSR’s Betsy Fargo, (A Buyer’s Guide to GHG Accounting Tools) published in GreenBiz on May 20,  describes some of the tools available, and how to evaluate their applicability to an individual company’s priorities.  Communicating is important…but solid data underpinning the messages is critical.

Tags: businesses going green, corporate sustainability, environmental reporting, LinkedIn, software, sustainability strategy

SAP has just released its 2009 sustainability report, and it’s a game changer.  This is more than a report.  It’s an interactive,  experiential site with great visual appeal, and a number of innovative ways of expressing sustainability information.  The “materiality matrix” shows sustainability issues analyzed by the impact on SAP’s business and by the importance to stakeholders.  Community feedback is solicited for the matrix and then shared, as are changes in material priorities year-over-year.  Stakeholder engagement is clearly a highly regarded value, emphasized by the banner running across the top of  the site asking for feedback and a “share your thoughts” comment box on most pages.  SAP achieved an A+ rating from GRI, and has committed to quarterly updates of its carbon footprint.  Of course, not every company can do this.  What SAP has done requires resources, lots of them.  It’s daunting enough for most companies to collect, validate and disseminate the data required for a sustainability report.  And SAP makes no secret of the fact that this strategy brings other benefits, such as a large market opportunity for products in the SAP lineup that capture and manage environmental data.  Still…a sustainability report that can be experienced as a participant, instead of as a recipient, is a new way to play, and one that will have lasting effects on sustainability and CSR reporting.

Tags: corporate sustainability, environmental reporting, environmental sustainability, LinkedIn, measuring results of green business strategy, SAP, sustainability strategy

Sustainability Communications by Bay Area Companies

Those of us who live or work in the San Francisco Bay Area think of it as a progressive region, leading the nation in various aspects of environmental awareness and sustainability.  Laws like Assembly Bill 32 (The Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006), Title 24 Energy Efficiency Standards, and carbon tax regulations by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District are forward-thinking evidence of such progressiveness.  But how do Bay Area companies stack up when it comes to sustainability reporting?  We took a close-up look at the largest Bay Area companies to see how they were reporting their environmental impacts and efforts.   Download the executive summary.

Who Reports?

Of the companies on the San Francisco Chronicle’s Chron 200 list, approximately 1 in 4 issued environmental sustainability communications of any kind – whether as a response to a questionnaire like those from the Carbon Disclosure Project, filing a report with a registry such as the Global Reporting Initiative or EPA Climate Leaders, or simply including such information in a corporate social responsibility report or in a section of their websites.
It turns out that size does matter when it comes to reporting.  There seems to be a line of demarcation right at $1 billion in annual revenue.  Almost 60% of the companies over that size reported about their efforts compared to just 8% of those with revenue below $1 billion.

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Tags: businesses going green, corporate sustainability, environmental reporting, environmental sustainability, LinkedIn, Sustainability Communications, sustainability strategy