Every business has stories of success. Those stories are the compelling piece to building confidence with your customers and investors. Creating a sustainability report allows your business to tell these stories in a structured, transparent way, backed by data.

Here are some benefits to producing a sustainability report as outlined by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI):

INTERNAL BENEFITS

• Internal benefits for companies and organizations can include:
• Increased understanding of risks and opportunities
• Emphasizing the link between financial and non-financial performance
• Influencing long term management strategy and policy, and business plans
• Streamlining processes, reducing costs and improving efficiency
• Benchmarking and assessing sustainability performance with respect to laws, norms, codes, performance standards, and voluntary initiatives
• Avoiding being implicated in publicized environmental, social and governance failures
• Comparing performance internally, and between organizations and sectors

EXTERNAL BENEFITS

• Mitigating – or reversing – negative environmental, social and governance impacts
• Improving reputation and brand loyalty
• Enabling external stakeholders to understand the organization’s true value, and tangible and intangible assets
• Demonstrating how the organization influences, and is influenced by, expectations about sustainable development

Source

This workshop will help you focus on building your report by orienting you to the tools available. You will walk away with the ability to produce a sustainability report using the GRI framework. Bringing a laptop is highly encouraged to help you follow along.