Top 5 Strategies to Increase the Reach of Your CSR and Sustainability Reports

As more and more corporations start to embrace annual reporting as a method for communicating their commitment to people and planet, many new services and strategies have emerged to help promote corporate reports and make certain they reach their intended audience of concerned stakeholders. Below is our list of the 5 best tactics to promote your company’s sustainability report and make certain it stands out from the crowd.

1.     Join the Distribution Revolution

Though it is important to attract new audiences, it is equally as valuable to make your reports seen by key global stakeholders. A content distributor like 3BL Media assures that your report reaches key sustainability thought leaders and journalists, as well as circulates your CSR report through traditional media outlets, social media, and a large community composed of CSR bloggers, subscribers, affiliates and more. By signing up for this service, you can be confident that your sustainability reports are reaching a key audience of both stakeholders and newsmakers.

 

2.     Use Digital Publishing to Engage New Audiences

The traditional format for a CSR report is a simple PDF document made available for download via a company’s website or embedded in a press release. While your report should certainly be available as a PDF, this should not be the sole form in which your report is made available. By publishing your CSR report as a mobile application you will be able to reach a much larger audience, embed multimedia content such as video and audio clips, and more fully capture the attention of your stakeholders by allowing them greater interactivity with your report. In addition, digital publication makes your report itself more sustainable by saving on paper and printing costs. Through our Digital Publishing Service Brave One takes your existing reporting assets, enhances them with multimedia interactivity, and brings your CSR report to life on mobile and eReader devices such as Apple’s iPad and Google’s Android Tablets.

 

3.     Add Your Company Profile to Corporate Register

Corporate Register is a primary resource for promoting CSR reports around the world. Sharing your report in this directory is a tried and true method of ensuring that it will reach a global stakeholder audience.  After creating a profile through which your reports will be distributed, they will be included in a feed of reports both on the Corporate Register site as well as in email alerts to Corporate Register’s subscribers.

 

4.     Break Your Report Down to Smaller, More Shareable Content

Simply distributing the entirety of your report to a wide audience does not guarantee that they will have the time or the energy to sit and read through 80 plus pages of information. To interest more readers, break sections of your report down into smaller, more digestible content pieces such as blogs, case studies, infographics, and press releases. Once you have done this, be sure to promote all of these content pieces through your company’s social media outlets. 3BL Media makes sure all of their clients content is promoted via their social media channels, so consider using them as promotional partner for your new content. If you need assistance in creating smaller content pieces out of your sustainability report, Brave One’s Earthbound Marketing service is one resource that can assist in content development. Distributing your report’s facts and information over time through smaller pieces of content assures that it will be more widely (and eventually) more fully read.

 

5.     Follow Global Reporting Initiative’s Reporting Framework

The GRI guidelines are widely used and accepted as the standard for CSR reporting. The Global Reporting Initiative also offers an evaluation of how well your report matches their framework. By increasing your credibility with the GRI framework, your report receives promotion through GRI as well as becomes more commendable and newsworthy.

We hope that these tools and strategies help you extend the reach of your sustainability reports. Have any other promotional tools that we have missed?  Please share them in the comments below: