Salterbaxter Campaignable Reporting 2017

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How to campaign your report Inside: Make the most of your content, reach broader audiences and demonstrate impact through reporting.

Transcript of Salterbaxter Campaignable Reporting 2017

Page 1: Salterbaxter Campaignable Reporting 2017

How to campaign your report

Inside:

Make the most of your content, reach broader audiences and demonstrate impact through reporting.

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C.

THE WORLD Broader society

and communities

A.

THE COMPANY The business and

its brands

B.

THE AUDIENCES The people you are trying to reach and

influence

CAMPAIGNABLE REPORTING: THE BIG BANG SALTERBAXTER

UNLEASHING YOUR CONTENT THROUGH CAMPAIGNABLE REPORTING

DEFINING IMPACT AND HOW TO MEASURE IT

The challenge is that while there’s a need to communicate more directly and make the most of digital channels, reporting requirements continue to become more complex with frameworks and indices driving ever deeper disclosure, comparability and integration.

So while progress is being made, companies need to find new ways of making the most of their reporting efforts and turn them into effective engagement assets.

We think a campaignable reporting mindset – aligning target audience, content, channel and impact – can deliver far more value from the hard work of reporting and ensure its content reaches way beyond the experts.

The opportunity A ‘campaign’ is dynamic, with a clear audience, message and purpose at its heart. A campaignable report should provide the foundation for wider amplification and influence by focusing on the following:

Ensuring cohesion through a clear purpose and plan. It is critical when creating campaignable content to build a simple and connected narrative and align this to clear communications goals.

Targeting and reaching wider audiences. Identify specific stakeholder and influencer groups, and then design content and formats to appeal to them. Inviting content from others also greatly enhances your network for sharing.

Making more of existing content. Create content to be intriguing and intelligible to non-experts and make it available in bite-size formats to increase the opportunity for re-use and sharing.

Connecting content to the digital ecosystem. Be discoverable, create content that is ready to embed into social platforms. Meeting audiences where they are, rather than expecting (or hoping) they come to you.

Allowing others to advocate, share and talk for you. Encourage peer-to-peer perspectives and a willingness to share and debate to encourage others to open up and enhance credibility.

Measuring and optimising your impact. Set measurable goals. Track and respond to these throughout the course of the activity to maximise your impact.

Last year, over 6,000 non-financial reports were published globally,1 driven largely by regulation and increasing stakeholder expectation. In addition, audiences are broadening and expectations are aligning between consumers and other stakeholders. With these new pressures, companies need to think differently and reach beyond the ghetto of sustainability experts.

We think a campaignable reporting mindset can deliver far more value from the hard work of reporting.

“Over the following pages we outline the key elements of a campaignable reporting approach and show how some of our clients have successfully adopted different tactics to engage with wider audiences.

Measuring impactFew clients set targets or outline goals for the reporting project itself. Even fewer set measurable ones. This hangover, stemming from its ‘disclosure’ origins and the print-only era, has dampened any expectation for return on investment. But it’s now time to grasp the opportunity offered by digital communications and make robust, transparent measurement a reality for reporting. Defining the parameters for measuring success typically involves two sides:

2 Direct performance – measuring the success of the report itself: The extent to which the report itself is used, shared and repurposed. Typical metrics would include:

Activity: number of reports printed, downloads, supporting launch events

Reach: number of site visitors, event attendees

Engagement: duration on site, number of pages visited, number of content interactions and shares

Advocacy: mentions of the report online, proportion of influencer support

Useful for: informing whether your report is reaching intended audiences and influencers, building genuine engagement and presenting content in the right ways.

1 Indirect performance – measuring the wider impact of your report: The extent to which a report and the content it contains can support overall business and communications priorities.

Useful for: informing how you design and structure your report to directly support your business goals rather than the straightjacket of reporting conventions. (Right diagram)

Establishing a baseline for performanceOnce performance parameters have been agreed, previous year activity, historical data and current conversations can be analysed to set a baseline for performance and determine KPIs.

Whether building leadership for particular issues, enhancing overall reputation or growing engagement, access to this kind of rich, quantitative and qualitative data should make a big difference to how you communicate, who you are able to reach and how you demonstrate a return on your reporting investment.

Critically, it means that you can then concentrate on making sure that the content and communications strategy deployed works to achieve these outcomes and can support how you evolve your approach over time.

A. Example indicators: Awareness of your purpose; sustainability rankings; commercial partnerships; investment opportunities

B. Example indicators: Employee sentiment; stakeholder endorsement; peer recognition; customer sentiment; reputation trackers; influencer engagement

C. Example indicators: Share of voice, size of conversation and sentiment towards material issues and key messages

Indirect performance Measuring the wider impact of your report:

1According to the GRI Sustainability Disclosure Database

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Downloads

Twitter chat

Twitter

Twitter

YouTube

YouTube

LinkedIn Pulse

LinkedIn Pulse

Media channels

Blogs

Blogs

Facebook

Instagram Snapchat

Intranet

Internal Comms

In-store

Media channels

CONTENT TYPE

CONTENT FORMAT

CHANNEL

CONTENT FOCUS

A

ppro

ac

h

Impact

Stories

Call to actions Teasers

Video

V

ideo

Inf

ogra

phic

Opinion piece

Infographic Data dashboard Th

ird-p

arty content

YOUR REPORT

Highlights

Data

Key initiatives and collaborations

Case studies and features

User generated

stories

Leadership voice

Strategic focus

Macro issues

A CAMPAIGNABLE REPORTING ECOSYSTEM

For a report to be campaignable, it requires a systematic audience and channel plan, with core content carefully tailored to each. As this graphic illustrates, it should start with your own channels and those of your people and partners, but should also ripple out to ‘earned’ channels through relevance and resonance.

Being mindful of: – the networks and communities you want to target;

– the channels within which they can be found;

– the content formats they may use; and

– the messages you want to convey

all helps define an approach to content that can live and reach far beyond the originating report.

Storytelling Bring to life unique

stories and actions by blending fact with

visually rich and emotive media to capture

imaginations.

Data Make data accessible

and easier to share with infographics and design-led highlights that are optimised for

social media.

Innovation Hero your areas of

leadership or innovation, and connect these with peers and stakeholders

who also care about the topic.

Partnerships and third parties

Broaden your reach and legitimacy by

inviting key partners to contribute to content,

highlight collaborations to their social networks or

participate in events.

User-generated content Whether curating existing

content or creating new, injecting audience

perspectives and content will intrinsically increase

relevancy and visibility. This is true for all audiences from experts to consumers. Think, Instagram galleries

and guest features.

Employees as advocates External audiences can be more trusting of employees than the corporate voice, so ensure they have the right

tools, content and motivation to share the message.

Issue/sector specific Build dialogue with

issue-specific communities and stakeholders through

tailored content that engages them on and offline.

Build conversation Connecting your key messages

to ‘hot’ newsworthy topics, makes it easier for wider organic PR.

Or design content as subsequent tools for customer-facing teams.

DESIGNING CONTENT WITH A BANGThere are many ways to create compelling content that can live beyond your report. By deploying these tactics, both reach and depth of engagement can be dramatically improved.

CAMPAIGNABLE REPORTING: THE BIG BANG SALTERBAXTER

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IN PRACTICE:

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2020 Global Sustainability Framework

The Premier League’s end-of-season review covers their economic and community contribution but has struggled to connect with key audiences or issue-specific influencer groups. Building on the launch of the new brand, we transformed the content and approach to deliver a highly active and campaignable mobile-first report.

This report hero’s the Inspiring Stories of the people that make the League a success. An inclusive first-person perspective is supported by simple and lively infographics and bespoke functionality that allows users to share individual graphics, infographics, videos or text snippets across multiple platforms. The report also acted as a hub for engaging user-generated content, such as the call for ‘Selfies of the Season’, driving active traffic from the broader football family.

C&A, the international fashion retailer, produced its first ever Group-wide sustainability report to help establish a new global strategy and highlight its contribution to global issues in a highly scrutinised sector. We developed a digital-first report, supported by high-quality video content and quick summary PDFs, to help amplify the content to broader audiences.

The site takes a storytelling approach using unique outputs from C&A’s partnership with the National Geographic channel. Original film material presented an objective view of the cotton industry, focusing on modern-day challenges and innovations. The content has a clear appeal to sustainability stakeholders and consumers, and reached wide audiences through social channels, event promotion and on-air teasers.

The report website remains current by incorporating sustainability news updates, so it can be kept fresh and repromoted as necessary.

Coca-Cola Enterprises (now part of Coca-Cola European Partners) built a campaignable communications approach over several years. It has systematically transformed content and the format of its report to ensure it can be used and repurposed by the business and its stakeholders as easily as possible.

Visually unique and multifaceted infographics have always been at the heart of the report’s success and were developed to include interactive, animated elements for targeted use on social media.

The report was designed from the outset to support wider communications plans and be customisable for different stakeholders, local markets and channels. This resulted in stronger resonance and wider amplification of key content and performance highlights.

OUR IMPACT

– During the launch fortnight, 33,836 people accessed the site, leading to 73,688 page views (up 244% and 403% respectively compared to previous years).

– The user-generated and dynamic content encouraged 62% of visitors to return, compared to 26% previously.

OUR IMPACT

– As a first report it has set clear benchmarks for reach and engagement that C&A can build on for the future.

– The shareability of graphics and stories has also allowed C&A to produce ongoing communications.

OUR IMPACT

The focus on delivering activity that can live beyond the confines of a traditional report has contributed towards the winning or shortlisting of an impressive 11 Corporate Register Reporting Awards (CRRA) from 2012–2016 for Creativity and Communications, Innovation in Reporting and Best Report, amongst many others.

CAMPAIGNABLE REPORTING: THE BIG BANG SALTERBAXTER

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START WITH A CAMPAIGN, NOT JUST A REPORT

Printed by CPI Colour CPI Colour are CarbonNeutral® and FSC® chain of custody certified.

Printed on UPM Offset, an FSC® Mix grade paper.

About SalterbaxterWe are a leading international sustainability strategy and communications consultancy. We help companies and brands Step Up to the challenge of the changing relationship between business and society.

We combine smart strategy, savvy insights and sharp creativity to help business build purpose, deliver performance and drive transformation.

Our innovative SBTribe service provides social media insight, influence and impact. It helps clients capture and respond to influencer and issue trends impacting their business and reputation online.

Campaignable reporting cannot be an afterthought – developing a communications strategy and campaign approach should be fundamental to the initial brief. It is a great opportunity to define what success should look like, and measure it.Salterbaxter’s unique blend of skills means we can help define and lead compelling campaigns, develop great reporting content, identify key influencers, manage your digital outreach and ultimately build more meaningful stakeholder dialogue.

LONDON 82 Baker StreetLondonW1U 6AETel +44 (0)20 7229 5720

www.salterbaxter.com @salterbaxterMSL

By combining our subject matter expertise in reporting, sustainability, communications, digital know-how and social media insight, we can identify:

– Clear messaging, stories and campaign ‘hooks’– The influencers and stakeholders that you need

to engage with– The best way of engaging them– The issues, type of content and activities to which they

will respond– How to measure the impact of your report and outreach,

through both your own website and a wider spread of digital channels

NEW YORK CITY 375 Hudson Street14th FloorNY 10014USATel +1 646 500 7906

Get in touch to find out more: Suzanne Blake – [email protected]