10.3.6. Evaluating the effectiveness of the environmental report
There is always scope for improvement in environmental reporting. Ultimately, environmental reporting should aim to satisfy the information needs of your target audience and so it makes sense to seek your readership’s opinion regarding your report. A ‘reactive’ or ‘proactive’ approach can be taken
The reactive approach involves waiting for the readership to respond to your report and is cheaper, less time consuming and easier to carry out. Typical techniques include - supplying a contact name and phone number within the report, providing a pre-paid reply slip, or as is increasingly common, inserting a detachable questionnaire for the reader to complete and return (See Box 10.4).
The proactive approach involves actively contacting a representative sample of your readership to establish their views and while generally more expensive and complicated to carry, can provide more meaningful and reliable results. Techniques range from simple telephone polls, and targeted postal questionnaires, to in-depth, oneto-one interviews, and specific “stakeholder workshops” - where representatives of different reader groups are invited to attend and express their views.
Perhaps one of the most extensive stakeholder consultation processes was undertaken by IBM in the UK. IBM employed the environmental consultancy ECOTEC on a one year project to identify and prioritise stakeholder requirements, and develop a systematic means of responding to these issues. The result was an eleven page report entitled “Consulting the Stakeholder” which defines IBM approach. Whilst consultation on this scale is beyond most if not all SMEs, a scaleddown version of this approach may prove valuable.
To summarize, evaluating your environmental report enables you to monitor its effectiveness provides a valuable feedback mechanism that allows you to improve the content of future reports enables you to have confidence that you are meeting the information needs of your stakeholders