CSR REPORT MONITOR
CSR reporting is now a critical element in communicating a company's social and environmental policies to the investment community and other stakeholder populations. But, after all the time and effort expended on their development, how well do they perform "out there", among your various constituencies? Do targeted individuals recall having received the report? Do they read it? What do they read? How much time do they spend on the report, in total, and on specific content areas? What are their opinions of the report in terms of relevance and sufficiency of information, clarity of presentation, and credibility? After making these determinations "CSR Report Monitor" measures how important it is, to your target audiences, that defined subject areas be addressed, i.e. corporate governance, environmental performance, customer satisfaction, employee relations, etc. It then obtains opinions of how well your report deals with each of these areas, on an absolute basis and relative to reports issued by companies in the same or comparable industries. "CSR Report Monitor" also elicits ratings of your company on a standardized battery of financial and CSR-related dimensions. Study participants are then asked to specify the extent to which each rating was influenced by exposure to your report. This procedure provides a mechanism whereby the incremental effects of your CSR reporting on corporate reputation might be determined. This could be accomplished by comparing the current research findings to image data derived from more general stakeholder populations. Information is also elicited regarding the reasons that individuals have for reading these reports or the uses to which the information is put, i.e., product purchase, employment or investment-related decisions, and its utility relative to other sources of information. The study would be drawn from the universe of individuals to whom your CSR report was directed and would be representative of that population. You would have the opportunity to request that the number of interviews within audience segments of particular interest be augmented, consistent with your company's communications objectives. Written and tabular analyses would be proprietary to your company, with the exception that some data would be anonymously combined with those derived from parallel studies. This would be for purposes of developing norms, against which the performance of individual CSR reports might be compared. You will also have the opportunity to append a limited number of questions to this survey, the results of which would be proprietary to you. If you have any questions or care to discuss any aspect of "CSR Report Monitor", please contact Doug Wheat or Mel Kram at 802-251-0500 or by email. |