One Step Beyond - Developing Towards Interactive Corporate Sustainability Reporting
Authors: R. Isenmann; Ki-Cheol Kim
Year: 2005

Providing more interactivity means a real step forward in corporate (online) sustainability reporting both, for companies (reporters) that provide such integrated reports and for various target groups (report users) who are interested in these reports. Interactivity includes procedures to involve target groups and mechanisms to give feedback, facilities of user control, and opportunities to select report contents and design. For companies, these features are of major relevance as they enable reporters to learn users’ issues and concerns and to initiate stakeholder dialogue. For target groups, interactivity is decisive on their perceived satisfaction, and overall attitude on sustainability reporting. Together, interactive sustainability reporting drives corporate reputation and subsequently influences reporting success, perhaps whether users actually pay attention to sustainability reports, how readers assess reliability and value of these documents, and to what extent stakeholders are willing to make use of such communication vehicles for decision making. Today, one-way-communication on sustainability issues merely through one size fits all hard copies or simple electronic duplicates just put on the WWW without any added value may hardly fulfil stakeholder expectations and reporting requirements. In contrast to the importance of issues of communication and how to report in codes of conducts, standards, guidelines, and other recommendations however, current sustainability reporting practice shows significant room for improvements, even for the best reporters. Hence, a framework is proposed and examples of the current practice are presented how a more interactive sustainability reporting approach could be shaped and implemented. 1. The need for an interactive approach in corporate sustainability reporting Corporate sustainability reporting or corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting respectively describes a development path towards a concept of balanced reporting, communicating the three pillars of environmental, social, and economic performance and its mutual interrelations, what in business terms is also called the triple bottom line approach (Elkington 1997). In the 10 years since sustainability reporting first became a topic of broader interest in academia, business, and government, it has rapidly grown to a field of research with increasing relevance to companies and capital markets, even through the eyes of investors (Standard & Poors et al 2004). At present, sustainability reporting seems to become part of companies’ daily affairs, also entering the business mainstream, at least to certain extent (KPMG 2005). Hence for a growing number, not just for some pioneering companies, it is more or less a question of how to report on sustainability issues, and no longer a question of whether to report at all. While the field is still evolving, as sustainability reporting matures and practice develops into a more sophisticated stage, issues of communication become of greater importance, in particular interactivity and its core features target group tailoring and stakeholder dialogue are of increasing relevance. Closely linked with cross media availability and other innovative opportuni1 University of Bremen, Institute for Project Management and Innovation (IPMI), Wilhelm-Herbst-Strasse 12, D-28359 Bremen, Germany, email: ralf.isenmann@innovation.uni-bremen.de, web: http://www.innovation.uni-bremen.de 2 University of Lüneburg, Centre for Sustainability Management (CSM), Scharnhorststrasse 1, D-21335 Lüneburg, Germany, email: kicheol@uni-lueneburg.de, web: http://www.uni-lueneburg.de/csm EnviroInfo 2005 (Brno) Informatics for Environmental Protection Networking Environmental Information Copyright © Masaryk University Brno, Brno 2005. ISBN: 80-210-3780-6