Sustainability reporting is important for your company, your customers and your employees. “Reporting” is sharing your sustainability actions, goals, and achievements with your stakeholders and community. At Green Buoy, we take “reporting” to mean sharing concrete sustainability goals, achievements and actions. In reporting, you are sharing sustainability numbers, figures, years and baselines on your website, on social media and in the press.

Sustainability reporting and strategy are both important piece of making more business more sustainable. But which should you focus on? Let’s look at the difference between sustainability strategy and reporting, with concrete definitions and examples for each.

How do you tell your sustainability story without releasing a sustainability report? Large companies use sustainability reports because they are required to publish annual reports. They can be useful PR and publicity tools for companies.  It can be hard to find the time or money for smaller companies to publish such grandiose reports. Reports can also seem outdated for smaller companies. 

Sustainability reporting, also called ESG reporting, is just as it sounds, reporting on your sustainability progress. You can read the previous blog about why sustainability reporting is important. Let’s talk about sustainability reporting as it relates to 2019 wrap-ups, and planning for future success. 

Today we’re talking sustainability reporting, specifically metrics. These little sustainability helpers are powerful tools for you to share sustainability with your audience and connect with them in a new way.

Sustainability data is a big buzzword for a lot of businesses. For good reason! Having data is so important to your business for countless reasons. As they say, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” This applies to sustainability data. See Part 1 of this blog series for how to collect sustainability data. You now have collected sustainability data that includes units, dollars, and ideas. What can you do with this collected data? I hope you try a combination of the below suggestions. 

We’re all about data here at Green Buoy Consulting. Data is how we prove sustainability works and keep businesses in check. It’s how we show businesses the value of their efforts and show them the good they are doing. Think about sustainability data you hear, “10,000 cups kept from landfills!” “Energy Reduced by 11%!” These data points tell a specific story. A lot of the sustainability consulting work I do involves doing this for clients.