The impact of technology on trust

Building trust is one of the objectives of sustainability reporting. New digital technologies can impact trust by influencing the clarity and accessibility of information for the user.

Clarity of documents
One of our key findings is that, as organizations increase the use of digital channels, GRI information becomes spread across multiple locations (see Where is the report?). This makes it harder to find and harder to be sure that a user has seen all the relevant information.

In addition, given the diverse and inconsistent terminology used in the sustainability field, and the breadth of online channels available to communicate information on sustainability, it can be difficult for a user to understand what the role of different documents is, and where to find information relevant to their interests.

We found two ways that organizations seem to be addressing these problems. First, the majority of organizations (95%) provide an easily accessible and hyperlinked GRI Content Index (for more information, see the section on the GRI Content Index in Where is the report?). Second, some organizations describe the role and content of different channels or documents. We looked more closely at how effectively organizations were doing this. This was a very subjective process and so our findings should be taken as general indications and not firm conclusions.

We found that only 5 organizations (12.5%) did not provide guidance on the range of documents available, their role, or a summary of the total scope of information available. Of the 35 organizations (87.5%) that did provide guidance, 21 organizations (52.5%) made it very clear what information was available where. The remaining 14 organizations (35%) provided some information on how information was organized, frequently through a narrative description.

Assurance
Assurance is generally considered to be one of the principal ways that an organizations can increase the trust in their sustainability reporting, so our research looked at how accessible these statements were. We use the term ‘assurance statement’ to mean any formal statement by an independent, external body on the reporting content and/or reporting process. Please note, there is currently a large variation in assurance practices; this research does not seek to comment on these practices.

We found that:

• 29 organizations (72.5%) included an assurance statement in their primary source of reporting.
• Two organizations (5%) used a stakeholder panel for assurance.
• 10 organizations (25%) did not include either in their primary source of reporting, although they did in some cases include statements from internal control processes.

A more significant issue with online reporting is the lack of a clearly defined boundary for assurance: ‘cover-to-cover’ assurance is less straightforward in an online report, and becomes a particular issue when 60% of the organizations we looked at provided GRI information in more than one location. One organization (2.5%) used a graphic device on the pages of their full online report to clearly indicate what content has been externally verified, which helped provide clarity.

Full online reporting also increases an organization’s potential to be more transparent. One organization (2.5%) provided a link to copies of opinions and assessments undertaken by third-party organizations in the ‘Downloads’ section of their full online report.

When we assessed the accessibility of the external verification statements, we found they were on average 3.5 steps away from the corporate homepage, compared with an average of 2.45 steps from the corporate homepage to the report (click here for the section ‘Accessing materials’ in ‘How we did it’ for information on what constitutes a ‘step’).

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