Chris Milton sent me this press release link yesterday published by a company called Gaia Metrics in association with CSRWire advertising a great new way to reduce your sustainability / CSR report costs by 90%. Wow, I thought. Lets check this out. Have they developed or found something new I did now existed?
This is what the first paragraph of the press release reads:
“Gaia Metrics announced today the availability of CSR QuickStart™, which dramatically reduces the time, complexity and cost of finding and assembling the words and numbers that populate a Corporate Social Responsibility or Sustainability (CSR) Report. By automating the process of collecting relevant CSR Report data, CSR QuickStart™ reduces the time to do so from months to just days, and cuts typical costs by 90 percent or more.”
I stopped reading after that paragraph to be honest. You know why? This product is simply useless in my view and experience working on these kind of reports. What quality can you expect by this automated process of information gathering? Not much is my answer.
My view of Sustainability / CSR Reports
Sustainability / CSR reports are so much more then just figures and words. Reports provide you with a view into the inner workings of the business, its values and so much more. This kind of report which would be produced with the above mentioned service in my view can only be a ‘rip off’ of a companies Sustainability / CSR practice.
Are we at this point in the Sustainabilty / CSR field where the practitioners try to lower the costs of a report with all tools available no matter how useless they are? I surely hope not…….
Picture Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/howardlake/4850758742