Best Practice in Action: Customizable CSR Reports

I recently came across Rabobank's reporting website for its sustainability report, annual report, and financial statements. Theirs is a great example of an engagement and reporting best practice: allowing stakeholders to build customizable reports based on their interests.

Why are customizable reports a good thing? Because they simplify information and make it easier to access. CSR reports can be a sea of data spread over many glossy pages, and it can be hard to find what you're looking for, especially with a PDF report. With a customizable report, on the other hand, stakeholders can build a mini-report including only information of interest, making it easier for them to analyze and synthesize the data. The ability for stakeholders to create a customizable report is one of 40 criteria included in the Stakeholder Score, a best practice guide and evaluation tool for companies' stakeholder engagement programs.

Having said that, on first glance, Rabobank's reporting site (see screenshot below) does NOT look simple and easy to access -- it looks more like a big, impenetrable database. However, with my first click, I found the interface surprisingly straightforward, and within two clicks I was able to find what I was looking for: information on Rabobank's stakeholder engagement, of course. : )



Another useful aspect of the interface is that the data is presented along many different axes - by geography, by product/service, and by customer type, for example. Not all of the top-level topics are clear to everyone (what exactly does a focus on "sponsoring" mean?), but with the variety of keywords, people can easily navigate to information that makes sense to them.

In addition, when you click on one topic (for example, on "Sustainability Report 2008"), the website responds by graying out any unrelated keywords. In this way, you can quickly see what topics interrelate, and can get a surprisingly insightful view into the company's CSR efforts from only the table of contents. For example, I can quickly see that Rabobank tracks its CSR performance in climate, energy, and human rights, but does not track performance in stakeholder engagement (another key best practice outlined in the Stakeholder Score).

I'm seeing more and more companies enable some sort of stakeholder customization on their CSR websites, though this is not yet standard by any means. It's a logical outgrowth of the social web, and I look forward to it becoming common practice.