Website analysis of GRI compliance

As PRNewswire wrote at the time, SDR Prep "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." SDR Prep got the Context Index horse before the 'full report' cart. It let clients start with a Content Index and recognize money spent on a polished CSR might add more value if spent broadening and deepening evidence presented to stakeholders.

This Content Summary resulted from an initial scraping of areas in a client's website specified as explicating compliance with a non-financial reporting standard--in this case GRI. Length of bars indicates frequency of 'hits' on terms at or below the high-level constructs shown. Colors indicate depth of hits (a dozen levels for some branches); with blue deep and red shallow. The next slide is an example of results found by crawling the rest of the client's website; plus generic or hardly confidential intranet threads like HR benefits.

The third slide updates the analysis, enriching the GRI Content Index (about its only prerequisite then) at virtually no cost to the client. The most striking change in this example is in "Identification of other stakeholders", arguably the main point of a CSR. However, switching a construct like "Addressing bribery and corruption" from red to blue is perhaps a more compelling example of how poorly human filters, alone, do at coping with TMI (Too Much Information)

The last slide shows how SDR Prep compiled industry benchmarks by scraping numerous websites for a prospect with a highly advanced CSR. It showed the target was above-average in reporting except on GSMS (Government/Management Systems) and Planning. The issue was then whether this was TMI clogging human filters or a genuine gap in an otherwise impressive GRI score.