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Integrated reporting is no cure-all for the problems of CSR communications, says Roger Cowe
What’s so great about annual reports? The proper kind, I mean, not corporate responsibility reports – the report and accounts document with the statutory financial statements.
To hear the current enthusiasm for integrated reporting you would think the annual report was the pinnacle of corporate transparency. Integrating CSR seems to be viewed as the ‘silver bullet’ solution – maybe these days we should describe it as the ‘killer app’ – that will solve the conundrum of how to get more information to important audiences.
This is certainly a challenge. There are more and more CSR documents and websites but readers are not exactly falling over each other to get at them.
Integrated reporting – putting corporate responsibility in a statutory annual report – is one widely-touted answer, but it is no less likely to disappoint as the killer app than all the other candidates.
Let me be clear – integrating CSR into everything a business does is definitely A Good Thing and the same applies to integrating it into all relevant aspects of communications, including the annual report. But that doesn’t meant integration is the answer to the CSR communications conundrum.
There’s integration and then there’s integration. Having a section on CSR wedged into the usual annual report chapters barely counts as integration. That is still in the ‘bolt-on’ category. It’s helpful in putting CSR in front of the readers of these documents but it’s not the killer app people are looking for.
Surely if CSR is really integrated it shouldn’t need a separate heading. It should be covered in the business review sections on products, markets, relationships, risks, governance and (ideally) financial performance. That’s not as easy as ignoring CSR in those sections and maintaining a corporate responsibility ghetto but it’s essential if CSR, and communication about it, really are integrated.
But would that achieve the holy grail of widespread, serious CSR readership? Certainly not. Annual reports are aimed at shareholders – only one of the many CSR audiences. And on the whole they don’t do a brilliant job because most shareholders pay them precious little attention (just like reports). What’s more, they are PR documents, far from the brutal honesty that the world craves.
While these documents might seem the ideal vehicle for integrated communication, the financial world has spent decades vainly attempting to make them more useful.
Weaving CSR into annual report text is well worth doing. But that will produce just one component that should be part of a suite of communications. There isn’t a killer app.
Roger Cowe is a writer, researcher and consultant and an associate director at Context.
What’s so great about annual reports? The proper kind, I mean, not corporate responsibility reports – the report and accounts document with the statutory financial statements.
To hear the current enthusiasm for integrated reporting you would think the annual report was the pinnacle of corporate transparency. Integrating CSR seems to be viewed as the ‘silver bullet’ solution – maybe these days we should describe it as the ‘killer app’ – that will solve the conundrum of how to get more information to important audiences.
This is certainly a challenge. There are more and more CSR documents and websites but readers are not exactly falling over each other to get at them.
Integrated reporting – putting corporate responsibility in a statutory annual report – is one widely-touted answer, but it is no less likely to disappoint as the killer app than all the other candidates.
Let me be clear – integrating CSR into everything a business does is definitely A Good Thing and the same applies to integrating it into all relevant aspects of communications, including the annual report. But that doesn’t meant integration is the answer to the CSR communications conundrum.
There’s integration and then there’s integration. Having a section on CSR wedged into the usual annual report chapters barely counts as integration. That is still in the ‘bolt-on’ category. It’s helpful in putting CSR in front of the readers of these documents but it’s not the killer app people are looking for.
Surely if CSR is really integrated it shouldn’t need a separate heading. It should be covered in the business review sections on products, markets, relationships, risks, governance and (ideally) financial performance. That’s not as easy as ignoring CSR in those sections and maintaining a corporate responsibility ghetto but it’s essential if CSR, and communication about it, really are integrated.
But would that achieve the holy grail of widespread, serious CSR readership? Certainly not. Annual reports are aimed at shareholders – only one of the many CSR audiences. And on the whole they don’t do a brilliant job because most shareholders pay them precious little attention (just like reports). What’s more, they are PR documents, far from the brutal honesty that the world craves.
While these documents might seem the ideal vehicle for integrated communication, the financial world has spent decades vainly attempting to make them more useful.
Weaving CSR into annual report text is well worth doing. But that will produce just one component that should be part of a suite of communications. There isn’t a killer app.
Roger Cowe is a writer, researcher and consultant and an associate director at Context.
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