A new report has suggested that global leaders in sustainability are failing to make the most of the potential of the web for their CSR reporting and general communications. It names ENI as the global leader that does the best. Many points are criticised across the board for not being up to scratch.
There's no doubt that the essence of the message is true. Companies are not yet making the most of the medium. That fact is probably not only applicable to their CSR comms, but their overall use of the web. The state of the art is still evolving, after all.
But in some of the details, I think the report is misleading, and it bears further examination.
Let's start with some points of agreement. Lundquist, the authors of the report, have made a number of assumptions that I would generally endorse.
A website should be comprehensive, reducing the need of its key users to go elsewhere. It should be user-friendly, with clear and intuitive navigation and no jargon. It should focus on fact and case studies more than self-promotion and commercial messages.
We hit just one challenge with the assumption about audiences. Lundquist say that "a website must speak to all audiences using language that is accessible to the general public not just for experts". This is the nub of the dilemma.
The CSR report/website is usually the only communication a company produces where it believes it is aiming to use one single communication to speak to all audiences at once. Most people that are professional communicators would say that such an attempt was doomed to failure.
You use the language of your audience. You address their priorities. If you do so openly, you can't be accused of giving inconsistent accounts of the facts. But you will make the most of your communication.
This makes CSR reporting hard to do. But it then immediately challenges some of the other assumptions that Lundquist make.
Each of the websites were analysed against 76 different criteria.
How were these drawn up? With a survey of "184 CSR professionals and sector experts from 30 different countries".
This would be fair enough, if the only audience - or even the key audience - for these reports were these professionals.
By the way, 14% of that number were university professors and students. Another 30% are CSR managers from companies, checking out the competition. 15% are consultants, looking to sell CSR services to companies. Only SRI analysts (11%) and journalists (12%) really have a considerable claim to be primary audiences for this information as stakeholders, interested observers as the rest of us may be.
