How I Made The First-Ever Social Impact Report For a Forbes America’s Best Startup Employer 2024?
I have been working remotely with a startup for around 4 years now. As the Social Impact Reporting Lead, I was tasked with compiling and publishing my employer's first-ever Social Impact Report. It was an important task and a huge responsibility. In this blog, I share my process and the lessons I learned along the way.
My background in Chartered Accounting helped me a lot with getting started since I was aware that there are usually some reporting frameworks or standards for such reports. I began by looking these up on the ACCA website since I am qualifying with them and hence I know they usually have useful information around such topic areas.
I found out about the GRI standards for reporting on social impact.
The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards provide best practice for reporting on a range of economic, environmental and social impacts, and give companies specific guidance on what information they should report on.
About 11,000 companies, including two thirds of the Fortune Global 500, use GRI standards.
I downloaded the standards and read more about their application from the GRI website. I learned that organizations can report either ‘in accordance with’ or ‘with reference to’ the GRI standards. When reporting ‘in accordance with’ the standards, organizations need to follow the standards accurately, including the fine details. Since my employer is a startup and we were doing it for the first time, we decided to choose the ‘with reference to’ approach. This meant we could use the guidance from the standards to inform our reporting but didn’t need to follow the fine details and the elaborate processes set in the standard down to the last whisker.
The process for reporting ‘with reference’ to the GRI standards involved:
- Identifying the Material Topics (topics representing the organization’s most significant impact areas) through assessment
- Defining KPIs for these Material Topics
- Measuring & Analyzing the KPIs
- Reporting the disclosures
I identified these topics by:
- using examples given in the GRI standards
- looking up internal company documentation
- looking up similar reports (sustainability or CSR reports, impact reports, ESG reports) from other organizations (organizations both inside and outside the industry of my employer). Example organizations I looked into included PwC, McKinsey, Swarovski, LVMH, etc.
- brainstorming by myself
- taking up topics shared by my colleagues working across relevant departments (like the operations team that could help me track impact across certain domains)
I decided on the KPIs. Again by taking help from examples given in the GRI standards, looking up any relevant metrics that my company already tracked, looking up similar reports by other organizations, and brainstorming by myself and others in my organization.
I used various ways to track, measure, and analyze the KPIs. These included:
- conducting company-wide surveys: you can use Airtable Forms, Typeform, or Google Forms. Just be aware of the limitations in case you are on the free plans
- measuring and analyzing relevant data available across departments (operations, HR, tech, marketing) and comparing this data with industry data where suitable
I had the option to publish the report either as A4 pages or as slides. I went with slides because the data I had could have been represented better as slides. Next, I had to choose the right tool to compile my report. There are many tools available for this purpose. These include Microsoft PowerPoint, Canva, Google Slides, etc. I used Canva to compile the final report which included text, images, bar and line charts, pie graphs, donut charts, and vector graphics.
The report was published on the website and across social media channels to share our progress and proud accomplishments to date.
Lesson Learned: Allocate Double the Time You Think it Will Take to Make and Publish the Report
I had anticipated that it would take me around 2 months to get done with the report at year-end. However, it took me around 4 months. Make sure to allocate time for the following:
- post-feedback edits
- approvals
- delays in accessing data (as you might need consent of particular team leads for access to different data)
It would be great to add some buffer time especially if you are making the report for the first time.
