Now It's Your Turn - CSR Reporting
posted by Dave Stangis on November 12, 2007
We are in the midst of pulling all the content and data together for our 2007 Corporate Responsibility Report that will be published in May, 2008. We’ve been doing this a long time and have used many different formats to obtain feedback in order to improve the Intel report each year.
We have 3rd party assessments performed on the report. It’s reviewed by students at various colleges and universities. We gather feedback from employees and community groups. Social investors also give us fairly specific feedback. The Global Reporting Initiative G3 guidelines even provide us targets to shoot for in terms of disclosure. However, I’m pretty confident there is more work to be done in terms of organization, topic areas and data – to make the report more useful to you – our readers.
There are 3 key components of our reporting strategy.
1 - a full pdf report that includes all content, applicable links, data tables and GRI references.
2 – a website which includes a link to the full report and attachments as well as seven tabs that provide an introductory level of information – Overview, CEO letter, Corporate Profile, Workplace, Environment, Education, Community, and Supply Chain.
3 – a printed “Executive Summary” that is available for pick up at Intel’s Annual Stockholders’ meeting, mailed to interested stakeholders and available for Intel employees and BOD. By the way, if you want to be on the hardcopy mailing list, just let me know. 
As we begin this year’s process again, I’m asking for your direct and honest feedback. Not so much on what you like or dislike, but on what would make the report better – more useful to you. This can be about any and all 3 of the main report delivery methods above or any part (or lack there of) of the full report – including the way it’s organized, communicated or in any content areas.
I realize this is voluntary – but I promise to read every last comment and share them with my reporting team. There are so many reports out there these days – and so many readers who are looking for something specific, I’d like to know what you want to see.
Thanks in advance!
Comments (1)
tagged: CSR report, Feedback, GRI, Intel
Comments
Nov 20 | Steve Jordan said:
Dave,
This is more of a general comment than a direct critique of your report, but I think that every CSR report should address the following questions:
1) What externalities do civil society groups allege that the company produces, and how does the company respond to these allegations? 2) what political or social externalities affect the company’s business environment, and what is the company doing to manage or resolve them (if possible)? 3) what civic and social benefits does the company’s core business operations generate? 4) how does the company evaluate the current level of its social capital (or goodwill) and what is it doing to strengthen it? 5) how does the company evaluate its role in shaping long-term development conditions? 6) what’s next for the company’s CSR program?
This is a very economics-centric view of what a CSR report should look like. If one of your core audiences is non-business social advocacy groups, they are going to have a whole different take on what you should include, and the frame may be entirely different.
This is a fundamental difficulty of many of these reports, in that they are trying to straddle two different normative perspectives, and language which may work in one context trips them up in another. Either you “don’t get it” or you are “soft.”
The best reports are those which are able to translate to both sides and which make as much sense to the Michael Porters and practical MBAs of the world as they do to the idealists and the activist groups.
Good luck!