Introducing The Sustainability 100 Report, 2023 Edition
As sustainability has become an intrinsic element of every company’s corporate narrative, businesses must adopt a strategic, joined-up approach to reaching key audiences through their digital channels. For too long, many corporations have promoted their sustainability efforts without connecting their sustainability narrative to their corporate growth strategy and bottom line. Fragmenting their narrative in response to the demands of rating agencies, new regulations and occasional ESG fire drill.
Against this background, we’ve published The Sustainability 100: our annual ranking of businesses that do the best job telling their sustainability stories online.
The Need for Focus
For those struggling to provide clarity, in our new report we suggest avoiding the temptation to focus on frameworks and headline-hitting themes. Instead, focus on the issues that matter to YOUR stakeholders and YOUR business. Not every company can end world hunger, stop climate change, and save life
below water. It’s better to identify where you are making a significant difference and the most material risks to business continuity and focus your message accordingly.
Just as important, consider where and how you connect digitally with your audience. Increasingly, companies are rethinking the role of their sustainability section, and asking, “Who is it really for?” We’re seeing many companies align sustainability sections with the needs of professional audiences – ESG analysts, rating agencies, and institutional investors.
These companies are de-cluttering navigation structures and content and using less emotive language to make it more factual, balanced, and easier to navigate. They are connecting sustainability content with other corporate audiences (such as job seekers) by weaving their sustainability narrative across their corporate website, brand and commerce sites and social channels.
For instance, the recent viral film from Apple took an inventive approach to sharing its sustainability narrative with consumers. Mother Nature, personified through Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer, grills Apple executives about the company’s progress toward being fully carbon neutral by 2030.
No One Size-Fits-All Answer
In our report, we’ve focused on how companies can effectively communicate their sustainability
story and progress to key corporate audiences. Clearly, there is no one-size-fits-all answer, but we think there are some basic principles every company can apply to optimize its online sustainability communications. To make it easy to remember, we’ve labeled them Transparency, Leadership, and Connectivity (TLC).
Our report provides examples of how The Sustainability 100 are applying the principles of TLC to demonstrate their commitment and progress to our planet and society.
We’ve used our proprietary Connect.IQ methodology to evaluate hundreds of leading global corporate websites against 50 different sustainability-focused criteria. Ranking them based on the transparency, leadership, and connectivity that they demonstrate with digital content, we developed The Sustainability 100.
Read our report to see practical examples of how to apply TLC to keep your sustainability narrative tied more cohesively to your operations, and how to tailor that story to different audience segments.