“These comments relate to issues that I see from a number of our partners – while we can help them to manage their stakeholder data many of them ask us for a stakeholder facing tool to help them engage – these tools, however, by their very nature, must be different for each group of stakeholders that you interface with, depending on their needs – I have seen everything ranging from sophisticated crowd-sourcing solutions for industry Canada down to individual consultants who can communicate on a solely verbal level with first nations communities
I agree with the basic principals outlined – first, identify your stakeholders. Second – decide how you want to engage with them. Third – adopt the appropriate tools.
Without these basic principals, CSR reporting becomes irrelevant, as Hendrik says, simply because it doesn’t address the concerns of the stakeholders”

“@Jonathan: One size definitely does not fit all, I think the only “general” modification we will do is translate the report into Hindi; our local implementation managers will communicate the rest. At the same time, I don’t think it’s a good idea to believe that sharing a report like this will have an impact, or even be interesting, to local communities in which you operate, or other stakeholders for that matter – at least in our communities, there are more important things to communicate, things that will have a definite impact on their lives.

@Mehrdad: great link (that blog is a well of knowledge!). I agree that a sustainability report as an end product is definitely not written for the beneficiaries, but rather, as you mention, for the intermediaries. The best approach by far in my opinion in creating processes where all stakeholders are identified and their needs and expectations identified and considered through a comprehensive stakeholder dialogue framework. Developing one is a big task, but should definitely assure that a sustainability report contains something “for everyone”. “

Thank you all for this conversation of practitioners.

With regard to reaching specific (vulnerable?) stakeholders, such as the local communities/program beneficieries you mentioned above, I would like to add a note of caution. Just looking at external stakeholders, GRI-type reports are – by design (and increasingly so with GRI’s vision of integrated reporting) – much more targeted at/useful to “intermediaries” such as investors or NGOs. You may be interested to take a look at my blog which highlighted observations by a representative of First Peoples Worldwide during the GRI conference and launch of GRI’s Mining & Metals Sector Supplement. He noted that GRI reports are important but also that they are not designed with local communities as target audience in mind.

See also my blog entry entitled “Are Sustainability Reports Designed for Local Communities?” which can be found here: http://prizmablog.com/2010/06/23/are-sustainability-reports-designed-for-local-communities/

“You raise an important point: it is essential in any stakeholder engagment, dialogue with communities of interest, that a thorough stakeholder mapping exercise be undertaken first, to identify both external and internal communities of interest. Once these are known, then an appropriate enggement plan can be drawn up, including the appropriate methods of delivering communications. Personally, I believe that this is fundamental to any community engagment or consultation process, and comes into play long before an organization even thinks about compiling information for GRI or any other reporting. We face similar opportunties to reach out to communities with low literacy levels. One way to reach them may be to also look to a bare-bones summary with very simple language and plenty of pictures and simple bar graphs to convey the key messges. Some of our communities have a strong oral tradtion, and we are also looking at how to deliver the summary information in a respectful oral manner to get the story across. It is not a simple matter, as you point out. I suspect that this is something each reporting organization will have to work out for itself, and there are thus great advantages in sites like this to allow an exchange of ideas – what has worked, what has not and what might – and to build on the “Wisdom of Crowds.” At the end of the day, surely the level of the key messages has to be appropriate to the audience and to the reporting organization. One size does not fit all..”

“Jonathan, very interesting. I think the issue of pinpointing and then making sure you reach out to your target group(s) is of the highest importance for the report to actually make an impact, and I wish GRI could provide some more guidance on this. Working for an Indian NPO publishing its first report, it’s been challenging to write it considering our most important stakeholder (in my opinion) would be the beneficiaries of our programs; semi-illiterate communities with a low insight into the corporate world. How do we go about communicating our performance – do we go to them in person, make executive summaries in their language, or some other way?”

“Thank you for this information. I want to share our experience. We produced our first ‘Report to Society’ for Canada using a “One Report” appraooch for 2008 at the beginning of 2009, and did not attempt to achieve any Assessment Level. 2008 was ouir srting date becuase this was the year our twon mines commenced production, and GRI really becaem aplicable. GRI does not fit exploration and construction phases veryeffective;ly. The report for 2009, released in 2010 was assessed by an external party as meeting the C+ requirement, but we did not have it externally verified. The obbjsective is to achieve a B+ for our report for 2010 next year. We will have this externally assessed, but not externally verified. The cost of exterrnal verification would be prohibitively expensive for us at this stage.As a private company, we see no real advantage in stretching to an A+ Assessment Level. This would fit in with our approach to continual improvement.

We spent a couple of months doing homework before compiling the first report so that we could understand what was required. We also looked at quite a few other third party reports to see what everyone else was doing, and have had external reviews of our drafts that were very helpful. We produced the report in-house and sent the final version out for printing. Our biggest headaches have been sucking data out of our internal systems where currently we do not have a single effective repository for information and each department has its own data silo(s). We are addressing this so that we do not have to enter data more than once. The other issue was writing the report at a comprehension level that best met the requirements of our audience. This is something we are still wrestling with.

Feedback from our communities of interest has been interesting. Most have complimented us on the increased transparency, regardless of whether they have good or bad feedback on other issues. We find this encouraging.

Actual reporting costs were lower than we anticipated. Our senior management and board is pleased with the report and the feedback that it has produced, and we feel that it is a good investment and a sound foundation for a social licence to operate.”