Get Credit for Your Good Work: 5 Steps to Promote your Sustainability Report

Many companies create corporate social responsibility or sustainability reports, but few are actively marketing their sustainability efforts. If you haven’t thought of your corporate sustainability report as marketing content, it’s time to start.

1) Make it easy to find

If you aren’t putting your full report online, start now! This critical first step make it easier for people and search engines to find it. With online reports, you can take advantage of interactive content to make your reporting more engaging, memorable and sticky. Plus, giving your sustainability report a permanent home on your domain shows that this is something that is important to your company.

2) Be mobile-friendly

The other day we posted some impressive statistics about the growing importance of mobile. With one in eight Internet page views now coming from mobile phones and tablets, mobile optimization is important if you want to make your report easily accessible. Whether mobile-optimization means using responsive design or creating an app depends on the particulars of your report, but mobile accessibility needs to be a consideration from the start.

3) Optimize your online report for SEO

Just as you’d optimize any other page of your website to get the best possible search engine rankings, your online sustainability report can also benefit from some SEO TLC. At the very least, do some keyword research. Sustainability efforts start as internal conversations and as internal commitments, so it’s likely that some of the language you use to describe these processes may not be the same words your customers are using. For instance, you may be focused on your product sources so where you think and say “sustainable fisheries” your customers think and search “sustainable seafood.”

4) Republish on different channels

While there are some people who aren’t intimidated and perhaps are even excited about reading a full GRI report, there are many others who don’t have time to get into that detail. There are many reasons why a formal sustainability report is necessary, but it’s not the only way to tell the story. Since you already have the content gathered, repurpose it into a less formal blog series, an infographic or even video interviews.

5) Share it internally and externally

Tell everyone (prospects, employees, customers, etc.) about your good work! An important benefit of repurposing your sustainability report is that these smaller, bite-size stories make for great content to share on social networks. Add social sharing buttons on your report and any repurposed content to encourage others to share. Similarly, make sure your employees see any content you created related to your sustainability efforts. Your own employees can be the best ambassadors of your sustainability message, and help to increase the word-of-mouth knowledge about your program.

Sharing and repurposing initiatives can and should exist beyond the report’s release date. Updates on stories and blog posts about new initiatives are share-worthy ways to continue the conversation around the company’s sustainability story year-round.

Taking these first five steps will help ensure that your company is known and respected for its commitment to a better future.