Innovation + Responsibility

I am on a mission. I've been on this mission for a while now, but I keep getting sidetracked and distracted from it and next thing you know another year has passed and I haven't made any progress. But this year it's for real - this year my mission will be accomplished (can you picture the banner hanging from the aircraft carrier?).  The mission: to radically rethink and reshape CSR reporting at Sun.  I strongly question the utility of CSR reporting as it exists today.  When the chances of your CSR report winning awards increases with an increase in the report's length - forget the report's actual content! - it's time to take a step back.

In October 2008, Sun released our third CSR report and I'm quite proud of what we published. The report itself demonstrates Sun's progress in that it aligns more closely with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), contains more robust data, has more publicly stated goals, and a offers greater degree of transparency than we have had in past reports. We also cut down on the paper associated with our printed summary.  To pull it together we had an unprecedented number of internal stakeholders provide content, data and feedback. And our crack designers and Web team were able to build a site with easy navigation and - my favorite element - an instant stakeholder engagement mechanism.  So why change a winning formula?

Well, for starters, nobody is reading the thing. Okay, not nobody. But not very many people. I've lamented this fact before. I won't go into all the gory details here, but let me give you an idea of how low our 2008 report traffic has been since our launch in late October:

There have been about 4,500 page views of the report's home page. 4,500 total. Including employees. That means that even if every one of those views was a unique visitor (which it was not) and each of those unique visitors was a Sun employee (which it was not), less than 14 percent of Sun's employees have visited the site. And, that awesome comments feature we instituted, the one that was meant to engage our internal and external stakeholders in a conversation about our CSR reporting - well, we've had a whopping 10 or so comments since the report's launch. I won't even tell you the dollar-per-page view or dollar-per-comment that works out to!

Second of all, the blood, sweat and tears that go into pulling the report together might make your head spin. More than 40 Sun employees were involved in pulling together the content and publication of our 2008 report, not to mention Celery Design and Context, our two consultants on the project. I'm sure this is not unique to Sun, and I'm positive there is a better way to do it. This simply is not sustainable. And if your sustainability report is not sustainable...well, something is definitely out of whack!

We need to get back to basics and revisit whey we even publish a CSR report. In my view, we report in order to:

(1) Keep the pressure on ourselves to continually improve our sustainability performance
(2) Meet our customer and (internal and external) stakeholder
requirements for data, transparency and short- and long-term goals and
commitments
(3) Ensure that sustainability is a key part of how we continue to evolve into a better-managed, more efficient,
more engaged - and therefore more successful - company.

Can we meet these objectives without spending piles of money and without over-burdening our employees? Look, the reality may very well be that large numbers of people are never going to read our CSR report because other than the experts - SRI investors, NGOs, CSR die-hards - it's enough for folks to know we have a report. So what do we do for the rest of the people - the ones who want to dig their teeth in and really see what we are doing, where we are going and how we are getting there? Well, the way I see it we have two options:

(1) Keep doing the same kind of report and work harder to attract readers
or
(2) Do a different kind of report. Create something that will do what a CSR report is meant to do, namely keep the pressure on Sun to continually improve our sustainability performance, meet our customer and (internal and external) stakeholder requirements for data, transparency and ever-expanding goals and commitments, and ensure that sustainability is a key part of how we continue to evolve into a better-managed, more efficient, more engaged - and therefore more successful - company.

I'm going for option 2. Wish me luck!

And if you know of other companies that have gone for option 2, please let me know. I am looking for inspiration. I already found some at Cadbury's latest innovation in reporting, DearCadbury.com, as well as Timberland's unique approach.