ESG report: how to measure the impact of your communication

CSR, SDGs, CSRD, ESG... When it comes to sustainability, there's no shortage of acronyms!

Here are the key points to remember: 

• The CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) is the text that requires the largest companies in the European Union to publish an assessment of their extra-financial impact. These regulations have come into force on 1 January 2024, with a timetable staggered until 2028 depending on the type of company.
  
  
• With this directive, the Commission is once again taking control of ESG reporting. 50,000 companies are affected, almost five times as many as under the previous framework (NFRD), not to mention their suppliers and subcontractors, who are also concerned by extension.
  
  
• All the reports will have to be based on the same non-financial criteria: environmental impact, social impact, and governance. One of the major contributions of the CSRD is ‘double materiality: in Europe, we are interested in our impact on the ecosystem, and not just in the way the ecosystem (in this case, the increasing scarcity of resources) modifies our business models.

We can imagine (hope, even) that one day these new sustainability reports will be on an equal footing with financial reports. 

A paradox: comms is the one big omission in the reports  

Until then, this is an unprecedented and potentially difficult exercise, involving every aspect of your business - including communications. How much do your comms activities affect your ESG balance sheet? And how do you communicate, both on your progress and your weaknesses? 

This is a highly flammable area, given the many risks of ‘greenwashing’. In this area at least, you can count on the support of My Impact Tool, which can add factual elements /objective data to the dossier. 
 
Measuring the impact of your events and communication campaigns with My Impact Tool simplifies and/or completes annual reporting. This tool enables you to track various indicators over a specified period through a centralized dashboard. It centralizes data collection of your projects and simplifies reporting for you and your clients, as the dashboard enables filtering of indicators by client, activities, or type of projects. 

Manon Glauden, Product Owner of My Impact Tool, is also ESG & Sustainability Lead at VO Group, she together with her team signed the Group's CSR report. She knows first-hand how important it is to include as much data as possible, to “justify every element we present.” 

“Whatever we call this end-of-year report, most of the time it focuses on the company's core business, although there is very little mention of communication initiatives,” she continues. “This is surprising, because all companies communicate, and these activities are highly visible. So, I think it’s important for the company to be consistent and to apply the sustainability objectives it defends in the rest of the report to its own communications strategy. All the more so if we want to be on the right side of history: all the company’s activities are today subject to the CSR filter.” 

Highlight your achievements 

Among My Impact Tool’s clients, we find both public and private actors. 

First, the Royale Union Saint-Gilloise football club proves that the sports industry can embrace change by using a measurement tool, setting an inspiring example for an industry that unites thousands of supporters. 

Second, the Mind&Market Forum, dedicated to connecting innovation with the market, exemplifies its core mission by using My Impact Tool. In 2024, with 900 participants, the Forum publicly shared the carbon footprint of their event and identified areas for improvement for future editions, thereby engaging their community and fostering transparency. 

In addition to measuring impact, your partners and in particular your communications agency can help you to reduce your impact through concrete actions and make these pages interesting and compelling. “I’m well aware that it’s not easy to communicate about something less than perfect,” stresses Manon Glauden. “But this is the time to dare!” In VO’s report, we can see the faces of the team who have taken up the CSR issue, as well as a timeline showing the major milestones on the agency's path towards sustainability. The objectives (together with their performance indicators) are presented in the form of a dashboard. There is also a summary of the Group's external activities to raise awareness among its partners and suppliers... because sustainability is a team effort and the CSR report benefits from going beyond the company's walls.