Top companies poor at online CSR engagement
Oct 23, 2009
Disclosure good but communication lacking, report finds
A report published yesterday by Milan-based communications consultancy Lundquist finds that while disclosure of information is usually of a high standard in CSR reporting, communication and interactivity are lacking.
The most damning result of this one-way system is that ‘companies are publishing a lot of good news and avoiding the hard (sometimes uncomfortable) facts that stakeholders need if they are to judge how well a company is performing in non-financial matters,’ states the report.
James Osborne, head of CSR communications at Lundquist, notes that while this reflects negatively on CSR’s interaction with investors, ‘we recognize that to communicate through a website effectively is no simple thing. Corporate processes are organized around reporting and disclosure. CSR in particular has evolved from environmental, health and safety practice, which, even internally, is a report-based process. A move toward web-interaction will be a real culture-shift.’
To test communication, Lundquist’s fictitious private investor emailed CSR inquiries to a number of companies, but more than half (48) failed to respond at all. More companies (17) took longer than three days than took less than 24 hours (15) to respond, and 35 percent of companies provided no contact details for CSR. Low-level contact of this kind requires no cutting-edge expertise: technology and financial companies were out-communicated by basic materials, utilities and industrials overall.
As the report points out, the internet has brought about higher expectations for corporate response. Initially, these rising expectations were concerned with effective reporting; since the rise of social media, however, the pressure for a dialogue has increased. ‘The same issue then arises for CSR reporting,’ Osborne says. ‘Companies are worried about how they can control it.’
European - and UK-based companies in particular - can feel better than their Asian and American counterparts about their CSR: the report shows the former outperforming the latter by nearly 10 percent. Eni, the Italian oil and gas company, ranks first overall; second-placed UBS trails it by a considerable margin.