Sun Releases Mid-Year CSR Report Update

Sun has posted a mid-year update to its 2008 CSR Report. According to Dave Douglas, Chief Sustainability Officer at Sun, there were two main reasons for the update:

1. We want to make sure we were holding ourselves accountable throughout the (reporting) year – not just during the report process at the end of the year. Over the long term we would like to move toward a reporting model where we publish timely data throughout the year rather than just once a year in a neatly packaged report. By definition, some of the data is stale by then.
2. We’re trying to sharpen our internal processes around data collection and progress measurement. With some of the CSR reporting being new in the company, if you only do it once a year its easy to talk yourself into not automating the collection and reporting process. We think in the end we can report some data more often AND at lower cost.

Last year, Timberland began releasing quarterly CSR data. Here’s a column from Alex Hausman,
Timberland’s CSR reporting manager at the time, on the company’s journey to quarterly reporting.