Are you wondering what kind of information should be included in your non-financial report? You can get to know that by inviting your stakeholders to help you define the report’s contents.
Do your business operations involve a variety of different stakeholders? Acknowledge that in a report compliant with the GRI guidelines.
The nature of non-financial reporting requires monitoring data from many different areas of business operation. What this brings about is that the co-ordinators of the reporting process must keep in touch with many people within and outside the organization. You can leverage this property of non-financial reporting and involve those people in the process of defining the report’s contents, identifying the relevant aspects, and setting the scope of the report.
This will, in turn, make the information you publish help the readers of the report to learn more about the operations of the company and assess the impact the organization has on the business environment it exists in.
Defining a report’s content
The GRI guidelines lay out a few ground rules for defining a report’s content, one of which is that you should involve stakeholders in this process.
By stakeholders, we mean the employees and those members of the company’s business environment who influence the organization’s actions to a significant extent, as well as those entities on whom the company has a substantial impact. Stakeholders also include the entities that – for different reasons and to a different degree – are interested in the company’s operations.
In practice, stakeholders can include many different groups:
- consumers
- clients
- contractors
- the competition
- members of the local community
- shareholders and investors
- legislators, local authorities, and governmental administration
- non-governmental organizations etc.
The sheer variety of different entities, whose examples you can see above, makes stakeholder mapping a crucial part of not only the reporting process but also of the management of the company in general.