BuzzWord || Services

Our services include sustainability and reporting strategy development, Global Reporting Initiative reports, materiality analysis, benchmarking, indicator analysis, training, report content planning, and writing and editing.

Successful sustainability strategies are integrated with the company’s business processes and culture, address its most important issues, establish vision and direction, set inspirational but achievable goals and specify targets and indicators. In other words, a tailored approach is needed.

We are experienced in working with diverse companies to analyze their needs and opportunities and develop appropriate strategies. We also offer insight into how reporting can help support strategy development and vice versa.

We believe that public reporting has great potential to help organizations develop and articulate their strategy for addressing the key sustainability issues that shape their business environment. It can also help companies achieve the transparency and accountability that are prerequisites for success in the 21st century.

To generate business value, public reporting must be connected to the company’s broad strategic goals and internal processes for performance measurement and management. It must also be reliable and credible to internal and external audiences. With those elements in place, it can support and enhance a company’s brand.

Our goal is to help clients receive the maximum value from their reporting by producing reports that are well-regarded externally, that stimulate internal learning and engagement, that provide a basis for external engagement with stakeholders and, most importantly, that support the company’s business objectives.

Reporting is a complex and demanding process (see figure below).

BuzzWord has developed tools and approaches to all phases of reporting, including the following:

The audiences for sustainability and corporate responsibility reports have diverse needs and interests. “One-size-fits-all” reporting is unlikely to serve the needs of any audience well. What most organizations need is a reporting strategy rather than a one-off report. A strategic approach to reporting can identify and prioritize the needs of important audiences and stakeholders. We develop an approach to meet those needs using a variety of reporting formats and media.

Sustainability and corporate responsibility reporters are often pulled in opposite directions. The reports must be slim enough to be readable, yet hefty enough to be credible. They must focus on what’s most important, but include a wide range of information to interest diverse stakeholders. The new GRI G3 Guidelines perpetuate the schizophrenia, advocating for relevance and materiality, but maintaining an extensive list of required indicators.

Companies are using several approaches to accommodate the competing demands. Increasingly, companies maintain a comprehensive website and GRI index to provide a broad range of information, while also producing a separate report focused on a clearly defined set of issues. But how should companies select the issues to include in a focused report? Increasingly, the tool of choice is materiality analysis, a method for identifying the issues that are most important to the company and its stakeholders.

BuzzWord has developed and applied a leading methodology for materiality analysis. Ford Motor Company's 2006/7 report and Starbucks' 2006 report provide good examples of the use of materiality analysis.

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Guidelines are the global standard for sustainability reporting. The revised "G3" Guidelines issued in October 2006 provide a rigorous reporting framework that includes reporting principles and specific indicators. The updated guidelines use a set of "application levels" to describe how closely a report follows the framework.
BuzzWord is experienced in helping companies assess whether and how to use the GRI framework. We have led the development of G3 GRI-checked reports at the A+, A and B levels, and a self-declared B-level report; three reports "in accordance" with the 2002 guidelines and others that have used the framework for guidance.