Storytelling has become crucial for bringing to life and personalizing how companies do business while serving their customers. This provides opportunities to build brand awareness and attract new clients, customers, investors, and potential employees.
While annual reports are traditional examples of how companies share their performance over the past year with their investors, during the past 10 years more and more organizations also have been producing yearly corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. This blog post provides an overview of what they are, what they include, how they are used, and ways companies can promote theirs.
What Are CSR Reports?
Corporate social responsibility reports are designed to improve the transparency of an organization’s activities specifically related to its impact environmentally, socially and governmentally (ESG) not only with investors, but also with employees, clients, consumers, public officials, academics, corporate managers, and the general public. ESG also is referred to at times as a company’s triple bottom line.
CSR reports were originally proposed in the early 1950s and have evolved through the decades. In the 1980s, when global industrial deregulation and the global economy took off, the topic reemerged. Some industries worldwide started employing CSR reports in the 1990s, but they really started to take root in the United States in the 2010s. According to Harvard Business School Online, 90% of companies on the U.S. S&P 500 published CSR reports in 2019. That was an increase from 86% in 2018, which was up from 75% in 2014.