Ok, I know that I'm biased when it comes to how organizations can leverage technology to provide visibility into their CSR initiatives; after all, I work for a software company that actually provides this type of technology. But my bias is for good reason. It works.

The practice of claiming environmental responsibility without having metrics or processes to back it up certainly leaves a sour taste in the mouth of the eco-conscious consumer. Even if an organization is truly engaged and mindful of their environmental stewardship, the public is now wary and weary of corporate claims that don't hold...um, water.

And the general appetite for responsible companies and governments when it comes to environmental protection is growing. Look at the recent survey of American attitudes created for Yale and George Mason University. It indicated that 3 out of 4 voters favor regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant and a majority of those polled felt that global warming should be a priority for the President and Congress. Scientific American recently ran a story on the study, if you're interested in reading more.

The only way you can really ensure your message of environmental stewardship is believed is by having the data to back it up. Many people will say that capturing that information is easier said than done. While I would never say it's easy, a change in how an organization does things never is, but I will say it may be easier than you think.

The availability of tools like our Environmental Sustainability Metrics application, is enabling a whole new level of visibility into how organizations are performing against their sustainability targets. Visibility that can provide reassurance to skeptical customers and other interested stakeholders like employees and investors. These tools don't just chart and graph existing data, they require tracking tasks to be completed, forms to be filled in and go as far as to raise red flags when activities run overdue. Performance tracking and trending is clearly visible from graphical performance dashboards.

So yes, I am 100% biased on the subject, but I am one of those people who feels skeptical about green claims and I love reading corporate success stories that can be backed up by metrics. Don't you?

Sustainability can be incorporated into corporate culture if concepts relating to environmental and social impacts are communicated in clear and meaningful ways, according to Dave Stangis of Campbell's Soup Company who recentlysat down with GreenBiz.com's Nature of Business Radio for a chat on the evolution of sustainability.

As VP of Corporate Social Responsibility at Campbell's, an Intelex client, Stangis has championed environmental and social responsibility and in three short years has made Campbell's a leader in CSR, having cultivated an environment of collaboration within the company.

According to Stangis, business leaders must "translate these concepts of social impact, environmental performance improvement, employee engagement, community involvement into ways to make their jobs better, more impactful, and improve their innovation and productivity, it's a whole different world. All of a sudden it's a tool and not an obstacle. And that's really the goal."

Listen to the entire chat over at Greenbiz.

Monitoring environmental impacts by tracking sustainability KPIs is essential for any business that wants to improve or report on environmental performance. But, from a financial perspective, how these environmental metrics are tracked is as important as the fact they are tracked. Results increasingly show a software-based EMS is the most effective way of improving environmental performance and boosting revenue.

Environmental management has been overcomplicated in recent years, and business leaders often feel overwhelmed by the perceived array of complex requirements associated with environmental performance. But it is actually quite simple. On a rudimentary level, it involves tracking and reporting on four critical metrics: waste and wastewater output, water usage, and air emissions. After analyzing these factors, a business can develop and implement new policies to mitigate its environmental impacts and save money. 

But the most substantial savings of environment management arises from the implementation of a software-based EMS. The return on investment (ROI) from a system that tracks, analyzes and reports on all of the metrics associated with your environment program can be enormous, and manifests in a number of ways:

• Efficiency: Environment management personnel commit a substantial amount of time and effort to basic tasks, including the collection, assessment and reporting of environmental data. These are all elements of an environment program that can be streamlined through software. For example, consider all the time an environment manager or full-time equivalent spends manually inputting data into a traditional spreadsheet program, assessing the data and generating reports based on the data. The right software will allow staff across all locations to input the four critical environmental metrics into a web-based platform and automate the processes of assessing and collecting data.
• Risk Avoidance: Often businesses face substantial fines from permit violations as a result of poor management of wastewater output and air emissions. A robust software-based EMS is capable or correlating real-time emissions and wastewater statistics to permit thresholds and issuing automatic email notifications to warn environment management personnel that a permit violation is likely or imminent. This allows a business to proactively manage emissions sources and discharge points to ensure permitted tolerances are not exceeded and costly fines are avoided.
• Brand Image: As the world becomes more environment-conscious, the value of a legitimate, environmentally progressive brand image is substantial. But the perception of a progressive environmental agenda is only as effective as the environment program supporting it. A software-based EMS will curb the amount of time spent on the minutiae of managing an environment program, freeing up time for environment managers to focus on improving environmental performance by implementing aggressive sustainability policies. Also, real-time access corporate environment KPIs and live reporting capabilities will enable a resort to prove its environmental performance with current data at any point.

A robust software solution will also provide cost savings associated with continual audit preparedness, the elimination of duplicate data, and the tracking of (and automatic following-up on) corrective actions. Further, environment management software is the most effective and efficient means of implementing and maintaining a robust EMS as well as ensuring continued compliance with regulatory and legislative standards.

Thinking of reporting on your sustainability efforts through an outlet like the GRI? Good for you.

That said, you may have encountered some opposition to the premise, or criticisms highlighted by Corporate Social Responsibility guru Mallen Baker, who has pointed to an oft-cited flaw in the GRI approach, namely the fact a report is essentially a company’s own narrative of its sustainability performance.

“All the current models of reporting expect the companies to provide their own narrative — to tell the story complete,” he noted on his blog. “And yet that doesn’t work, because the end user actually doesn't read the reports, and doesn't trust the company to provide its own context. There are no expert interpreters of this information. All the focus on assurance is about checking data — but that isn't the real issue. People by and large don't think the companies will lie about the data — but they fully expect them to paint the best gloss on what the data actually means.”

Yet, somewhere between GRI and friends’ overzealous focus on reporting standards and the noble spirit of making sustainability reporting as comprehensive and transparent as financial reporting, there is a golden mean that is arguably more passive, less resource-intensive, and — quite appropriately — completely sustainable. Businesses that implement a streamlined, electronic EMS featuring configurable reporting capabilities and real-time dashboards stand to benefit from two critical advantages.

Firstly, if all sustainability metrics are monitored and inputted across all business units on an ongoing basis and rolled up across administrative levels, much of the time spent measuring, collecting and analyzing data and generating reports that comply with reporting models will be eliminated. The time and effort associated with generating comprehensive sustainability reports has been a major gripe among participant organizations and critics, and a streamlined, software-based reporting process curbs the time and manpower required.

Secondly, with real-time dashboards indicating the status of sustainability KPIs (GHG emissions, for example), an organization is able to monitor the pulse of its sustainability performance and gauge the impact of new initiatives. In essence, instead of gauging and reporting on sustainability performance on an annual basis, an organization real-time dashboards and integrated reporting capabilities provide a means of perpetual monitoring and reporting.

We've covered the importance of developing a proactive plan, quantifying financial gains, understanding the role of metrics, and using software to manage your sustainability program for the most effective results.

Today let's talk about the often overlooked element of a winning sustainability program: communicating your progress.

5. Communicate Commitment/Performance to Stakeholders: While the primary function of sustainability initiatives will be the returns they deliver through conservation efforts and a number of other cost-savings effects, don’t miss the boat on the wealth of opportunities that accompany clearly communicating sustainability efforts and accomplishments to stakeholders. When developing a sustainability strategy, consider incorporating an ongoing sustainability reporting plan that conforms to existing frameworks (such as the IIRC, GRI and others).

While some critics have complained that comprehensive sustainability reporting can dominate resources and distract from essential business operations, proper planning, resource allocation and the use of software solutions (with configurable reporting capabilities) can render reporting a seamless and automatic process.

Even before sustainability benchmarks have been achieved, once a commitment to sustainable development has been solidified by way of a documented sustainability strategy, an organization can begin touting its agenda. The marketing, publicity, sales and customer relations benefits that flow from flaunting environmental, social and financial sustainability are too substantial to ignore.

In closing

We hope you've enjoyed our overview of the elements we believe are integral to a successful sustainability strategy. Please share your thoughts with us! We've barely scratched the surface of what can be a nuanced, multilayered file, but we've tried to provide some beginner-level guidance to the uninitiated organization that aspires to be more sustainable. 

As a parting thought, do not fall into the trap many newcomers to the sustainability game find themselves in by being either overly ambitious or forgetting to frame priorities accurately. Remember that your organization is a business first and foremost: instead of framing your business priorities in terms of environmental issues, frame environmental issues in terms of your business priorities.

We’ve discussed the value of a proactive strategy and quantifying financial gains in building a sustainability strategy.

Today we’ll look at another critical component of a sustainability strategy that is the heart of the adage “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

3. Understand the Role of Metrics: Before you make your first step into the world of sustainability – before you install that first compact fluorescent lightbulb – it’s imperative to understand you need to know where you’re at.

Along the lines of the lightbulb example above, it can be as simple as starting with an energy audit of your plants, offices, sites and other business units. If you know where you’re at, you can begin to set goals and targets, key elements of any successful sustainability strategy. The progress achieved through each action and each campaign within your sustainability strategy will be much more significant if they can be measured against where you were at when you launched your strategy.

Without defined, tracked sustainability metrics, you have no sustainability program. Not only will you be unable to monitor the success of sustainability initiatives and continually improve sustainability performance, you won’t be able to tie such initiatives to ROI and you won’t be able to share your track record with stakeholders.

Yesterday we discussed the role of developing a proactive plan in building a successful sustainability strategy.

Today is all about a term CFOs, VPs, Directors, executive team members  like to hear a lot: ROI.

2. Calculate the ROI: You may have achieved the buy-in of senior management, or your CEO may have provided a clear mandate to undertake sustainable development initiatives. Either way, acknowledge sustainability programs are an investment and spell-out in clear, concrete terms the tangible ROI a sustainability strategy will generate on a short- and long-term basis.

As suggested above, some indirect savings values will be coloured by probabilities and expressed as ranges. However, an honest, comprehensive breakdown — which can be developed in-house or facilitated by a consultant or software solutions provider in many cases — will give your organization a clear analysis of what gains can be expected from the adoption of a comprehensive sustainable development program.

As the years roll on, your organization can compare actual data against ROI expectations to tweak its sustainability program for the most effective results. 

Thinking of developing an organization-wide sustainability strategy?

An uninitiated organization — perhaps a young, yet fast-growing company just beginning to toy with the idea of pursuing sustainability initiatives in the interest of boosting financial performance — might wonder, given the multifaceted, complex purview of sustainable development, where exactly to start. The answer is simpler and more straightforward than you might suspect.

This week we’ll be reviewing five components of a successful sustainability strategy. The first aspect is all about a word we use a lot over here at Intelex: Proactive.

1. Develop a Proactive Strategy: Just as a sustainability framework is an intrinsically integrated framework of interrelated elements affecting all areas of business management, ad hoc and reactive actions have no place in a sustainability management strategy.

Rather than defining policies on a reactive basis, develop a comprehensive, proactive sustainability strategy to build a sustainable development program that is holistic, effective and worth reporting on. Certainly, start small: plan a series of simple conservation initiatives to roll out within the first few months or year. After all, your organization can’t expect to become an industry leader in one day.

However, integrate short-term goals with anticipated long-term accomplishments and delineate exactly how you want your organization to progress towards its sustainability objectives over a four- to five-year time frame. Also, as a part of your sustainability strategy, conduct a SWOT (Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats) analysis as well as an assessment of Risks and Opportunities to determine where your organization can have the greatest impact.

You've probably heard a lot of buzz about the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) in recent years. That's because more and more organizations have been reporting every year since the organization launched in 1999.

But have you ever wondered who, exactly, is reporting? The answers are much closer than you think. The GRI website features a comprehensive, downloadable reports list containing information on all organizations that have provided sustainability reports along GRI guidelines through the past 12 years (that GRI is aware of). You can download the report as a Microsoft Excel file here.

While only a few organizations have reported in 2011 (we’re only in the second month of the year, after all), what is striking about the list is the sheer increase of the amount of organizations that report year after year. Nearly 1,800 organizations reported in 2010, up from about 1,450 in 2009.

After downloading the report, you can sort by organization, country, region, adherence level and status (i.e., whether an organization’s GRI compliance status was GRI-checked or self-declared). The spreadsheet also provides links to (where available) the published reports of existing organizations.

So, for example, if your organization is looking for GRI best practices, find a relevant organization in the spreadsheet, check out their Application Level score (expressed as a alphabetical grade reflecting the extent to which a report adheres to GRI guidelines), then download and review their report to get an idea of what reporting formats and formulas might work for you.