Mallen Baker's Blog

Brazil result humiliates Global Reporting Initiative

30 May 2010

It is often said, in varying degrees of heated debate, that too few people actually read CSR reports. There's no point in debating the fine points of what indicators, what issues, and what formats should be used if the audience isn't there. In an attempt to counter this criticism, the GRI has initiated its Readers Awards. The exercise is designed to illustrate the wide, and interested, readership. It may succeed in the future, but for sure this year it failed.

Six categories. Six winners. All of them were from Brazil.

24 runners up. 14 from Brazil.

Brazil is not particularly known as the centre of excellence on CSR reporting. The fact is that the voting participants in this exercise were vastly unrepresentative.

Exercises where you can get such an unrepresentative result are generally built on a small base, or have been the subject of massive fraud. There is nothing to suggest the latter. So the GRI has only succeeded in outlining how few engaged readers there are, not how many.

3,669 voters may sound like a lot. Given that 2,000 reports were entered, it's really not. A large base cannot be so easily skewed by one country's voters.

This is just a symptom - really the entire exercise is flawed. Holding a global readers award suggest that there are significant audiences that consume - and are therefore in a position to compare - the reports of companies across the world. Or else - as here - it simply becomes a measure of which company's small bank of readers care enough about awards and the GRI to bother to vote for their country's companies.

A Eurovision Song Contest for corporate geeks.

The logic of such reports is that they provide useful and timely information for a range of different audiences. The best ones will be engaging with stakeholders that don't give tuppence for the GRI and its awards, but want to know about what the company is doing.

The worst of them will be doing exactly what the GRI tells them to, without much notice of what their primary audiences actually want.

This is why the GRI should move towards a model that it explicitly disparages - a series of awards judged by a panel of experts. At least then, you can find the people that genuinely do review reports across the world - or at least are prepared to do so from a shortlist. And you can have a set of transparent criteria, the robustness of which will support the results.

The current set-up has resulted in a farce and a humiliation.

Since the GRI has achieved successful engagement with the practitioners (its conference is now just about the largest that takes place) perhaps it is time to stop pretending, and to be prepared to ask radical questions about the role of reports in relation to its audience.

And if not, at least sort the awards out.

Tags: CSR reporting audiences stakeholders corporate social responsibility GRI Global Reporting Initiative Mallen Baker

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