GRI’s new comparison tool could provide the answers to a lot of corporate reporting questions
The cause of corporate responsibility reporting has come a long way in recent years, with a growing proportion of companies taking it seriously. But, amid the blizzard of annual disclosures, analysts and others have often complained about certain glaring deficiencies – comparability for one.
While in the financial world it is easy to benchmark one company against another, in the non-financial one, comparisons have often been for the studious and dogged only. The result has been that corporate responsibility reporting has not moved on as fast as it might have done.
A new database from the Global Reporting Initiative – overseer of the widely used GRI reporting standards – could help to change that, though. Once fully up and running, its backers say the platform should make information more accessible, benchmarking easier, and help shine a light on those not matching their peers.
The database is an interactive version of the reports list that GRI already publishes – but with extras. Users can search 7,500 reports from more than 3,000 organisations, comparing them against any of 79 performance indicators.
“Our mission is to mainstream reporting and we think this is going to be very important tool to help with that goal,” says Asthildur Hjaltadottir, GRI’s senior manager of report services.
Report or explain
One of the requirements of the platform is that organisations give a reason if they do not provide full information on a particular indicator – something that Hjaltadottir says may encourage deeper reporting over time.
“If it’s not on there, there are so many stakeholders who could then ask ‘how come you are not providing this information while all your peers are’. That’s certainly one of the motivations we have noticed for organisations to start reporting, because others are doing it as well.”
Hjaltadottir says the Amsterdam-based GRI has wanted to create the database “for quite a while”. It was finally able to do so through funding from KPMG Spain. The database, which is free to use, is available in both English and Spanish.
Analysts who crunch environmental and social material on a daily basis say the database will help them.
“One of the real challenges as an analyst is to get information that is comparable,” says Seb Beloe, investment specialist and former head of SRI research at Henderson Global Investors in London.
“The GRI initiative should really help to facilitate this by both providing a conduit for accessing and comparing this information and hopefully will also drive companies to provide more directly comparable information.”
Reports for the database are provided by 20 “data partners” that monitor the disclosures in their area.
“Our data is now more easily accessible, and more easily used for research, benchmarking, and study,” says Louis Coppola, senior vice-president at the Governance and Accountability Institute, the GRI’s partner in the US. “It improves the usefulness of our data, and helps to drive forward corporate and institutional innovation in sustainability reporting.”
Elaine Cohen, co-chief executive of GRI’s Israeli partner BeyondBusiness (and a regular contributor to Ethical Corporation), says the database will help consultants to advise clients on what they should be reporting. “If every company in a certain peer group reports on certain aspects or indicators of sustainability, then this sets a standard for the rest of the market and we want our clients to know about that,” she says.
GRI’s latest guidelines, known as G3, were published in 2006. The next version, currently out for consultation, is due to be published in 2013