Impact reports: to print or not to print?

Impact reports, sometimes called sustainability reports or social impact reports, are designed to communicate an organisation’s social, environmental, or community performance. Instead of focusing on financial performance, they look at these more mission-driven outcomes to show the impact the organisation has had on the world.

For large companies in the UK (defined by a combination of turnover, balance sheet, and number of employees), energy and carbon impact reporting is mandatory. Though not required to by law, some smaller companies choose to issue impact reports too. Many companies and organisations also have their own environmental or social aims, separate to those required by regulation, and impact reports give them a space to properly communicate what they’re doing and how well.

Some organisations create highly designed printed impact reports, others produce them purely digitally, and others incorporate them into their annual reports. Each of these approaches lets the organisation communicate their impact in a different way, depending on their audience, budget and branding.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the options available to organisations creating an impact report, and hopefully help you find the right approach for your organisation.

Impact reports: more than a regulatory obligation

Except in the case of mandatory carbon reporting for large companies, impact reports can differ greatly between companies and organisations. So, before we take a look at the options for your impact report, it’s worth discussing the different purposes these documents serve..

Who produces impact reports?

Listed companies are required to report their greenhouse gas emissions and data on their financial performance. Any company meeting two Firms are also required to report on their environmental impact and energy use if they meet two or more of the following criteria

• a turnover of £36 million or more
• a balance sheet total of £18 million or more
• 250+ employees.

In addition, many charities, NGOs, and public bodies are required by their internal charter to put out a report detailing their impact for the sector they work in.

For these organisations, there will be minimum requirements for the data they provide, but there is ample flexibiltiy in how that data can be presented to allow for creative storytellingh. Producing an impact report can, therefore,serve a valuable marketing function, allowing an organisation take control of the narrative around its social or environmental impact.

Typesetting, artworking and the choices of papers, inks and finishes can all work with the content to raise a report above simply detailing facts and figures, to telling a brand story.

While sustainability isn’t discussed with the same fervour it was five years ago, it’s still an important emotive factor for many consumers, and can have a significant financial impact for businesses. This is particularly true when it can be narratively linked to things like a company’s performance or brand positioning. 

Below, we take a look at a few examples of companies and organisation that have done just that, using their impact reports to tell a brand story.

Some great examples of print and digital impact reports

Les Mills: printed impact report on recycled paper

Fitness brand Les Mills produced a printed impact report, designed by Michael Tanner Design. It’s printed on 100% recycled paper, and has an accompanying digital version.

A clean white layout makes it easy to navigate the document, with colour coded panels throughout marking the company’s key initiatives. The layout follows a classic brochure style, with heavy use of illustration, photography and data visualisation to break up the text.

The report seeks to channel recognisable environmental tropes through the use of green design features and an emphasis on nature-based photography.. The choice of recycled paper supports this message, leaning into the company’s “healthy people, healthy planet” mission.

Photo credit @Michael Tanner Design, read his full case study on his website.

Patagonia: online social & environmental impact report 

Patagonia has made their social and environmental impact a part of their brand identity from the beginning. Their impact report, which they call their “Work in Progress report”, leans into that identity, reminding readers of their commitments and also talking transparently about their failures. As they put it in their introduction, it “details the truth about how we’re messing up, where we’re making progress and all the stubborn challenges ahead.”

The report is a webpage that sits on the company’s customer-facing website. The fact it’s one click away from the brand’s clothing line is a nod to the the importance of Patagonia’s sustainability to its customer base..

Visually, it’s easily scrollable, with links to videos, a letter from the CEO and other supplementary information, letting the reader curate their own journey through the content.

With bright colours, brand photography and down to earth language, alongside high level numbers, it’s a snapshot of the brand’s approachable identity. The result is something that feels like it’s for everyone to read, not just regulators and shareholders.

Brilliant Earth: jewellery brand’s online impact report

Jewellery brand Brilliant Earth has an online impact report that sits across several webpages, letting the reader explore by topic. 

The brand’s high-level facts are included in a letter from their CEO, signed in a cursive type – one of many touches which seem intended to lend an intimate feel to the report.

The brand’s marketing photography makes ample use of trees, leaves and natural vistas. This is repurposed here alongside their environmental achievements, a reminder to readers that these are luxury products and that the environmental aspects of the company are part of that luxury.

Rabo Bank: financial brand impact report

As a multinational bank and financial services company, Rabo Bank uses its online impact report to storytell its international investments and support for growing social enterprises.

Toggles allow the reader to scroll through different regions of the world and see the bank’s positive influence in each place. Key figures for each region and sector are pulled out, calling out positive social impacts such as the number of people reached, alongside more business-focused metrics such as the number of organisations in their portfolio.

Videos and case studies make full use of the webpage format, while an online version of a more traditional, brochure-style report is accessible for those more interested in the figures.

By pulling out specific case studies and regions in support of their numbers, Rabo Bank’s impact report puts human faces to the bank’s successes. This doesn’t just point to the good ESG work they’ve done in the last reporting cycle; it also underscores the global reach of the bank, the influence and lending power they have in certain markets and the financial sustainability of the companies they back.

Pangaia: printed report for a lifestyle eco-brand

Pangaia is a materials science company and lifestyle brand with a specific focus on sustainability, transparency and environmental responsibility. Their clothing often calls attention to its environmental impact and the company invests time and money into using materials that are better for the planet.

When producing their impact report, they wanted to continue this approach with an environmentally sound physical document. To this, they approached Park|Graphius thanks fo our various environmental creds, incluidng being completely powered by wind energy, and we printed a short run of 200 copies on recycled paper.

The resulting report is highly designed, in keeping with the brand’s own lifestyle products, but also environmentally conscious, making it a great physical representation of the impact it describes.

Tesco: impact report as an interactive online experience

As the UK’s biggest supermarket chain by turnover, Tesco is a lot of things to a lot of people. Responding to that, they’ve created a digital reporting hub, where their latest annual and sustainability reports can be accessed alongside tailor made reports, addressing specific issues.

The report has a focus on waste reduction, from the introduction of electric delivery vehicles to the recycling of supermarket food waste into animal feed. This lets Tesco align their success as a mass retailer with positive talking points around controversial topics, like last mile delivery and food waste.

Their sustainability report is formatted for viewing on screens, but has a familiar structure to many corporate reports, with headline stats, followed by individual sections breaking down their key focus areas: Planet, Health, People and Communities. It’s easily navigable, and something that can be edited or added to at any moment.

As well as having one central hub, allowing different stakeholders to zero in on their interests, Tesco makes use of the digital format with highly produced videos summarising the positive sides of their social and environmental impact. It’s a very persuasive feature, albeit probably requiring a level of investment that would only really be possible for larger businesses..

Vivobarefoot: digital report + downloadable PDF

Shoe brand Vivobarefoot publishes a two-part digital impact report. A microsite provides a high level summary, while a downloadable PDF report goes into the full details.

The full report has a landscape layout, with tabs to represent different areas of the report. It’s heavily illustrated in the same style as the brand’s marketing identity, with playful layouts of imagery and text.

The online part of the report makes use of colourful language, like “champagne moments” and “fantastic failures”, the latter of which is a high level summary of all the things the company thinks it should have done but hasn’t yet. The effect is of an approachable, transparent and relatable brand, creating an earnest feel about the actions on their funded projects.

Vivobarefoot makes full use of the possibilities of web publishing, with an interactive cursor, videos, and plenty of expandable and interconnected content, to allow the readers to follow the parts of the report most interesting to them.

Sir Kensington’s: creative, magazine-style report

Condiment brand Sir Kensington’s impact report is an oldie but a goodie. They turned over the fifth issue of their magazine Sandwich to be a publicly accessible sustainability report. The issue was called The Integrity Report and aimed to showcase Sir Kensington’s status as a B Corp company, vowing to be a force for good socially and environmentally.

This was an impactful way to draw shareholder and customer attention to the brand’s ESG achievements. From a marketing perspective, it positioned them in the context of the company being a high-end brand; an explanation of how sustainable their eggs are also neatly explains why they’re more expensive than Heinz.

Additionally, the brand was open and transparent about which ingredients they use might have an unavoidable negative impact, which strengthens the brand-customer relationship by presenting Sir Kensington’s as a trustworthy source, lending credibility to any positive claims they make.

Their report took a lot of visual cues from the issues of Sandwich, being the same size, with an uncoated paper stock, and a similar page count. This tied together the two publications for a coherent brand image, and produced an impact report that felt familiar and readable.

The Integrity Report was printed on recycled materials and had a four-page tip-in inside back cover, showing many of the headline statistics and figures that Sir Kensington wanted to shout about.

Integrated report from Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity

The charity arm of Great Ormond Street Hospital also combined its annual report and impact report into an integrated report.

As a charity, they’re required to produce annual reports, and their nature as a hospital charity means their core work has a social impact. The dedicated impact section details the effectiveness of their work, as useful context for their financial reporting.

The document is an interactive PDF, featuring double page spreads to highlight new sections and front and back cover art, combining the layout of a bound magazine or brochure with easy to navigate icons and readily downloadable versions of past reports.

So, why choose print for an impact report?

Companies often choose to publish information digitally, believing it will be a cheaper and more sustainable way to get the information to the intended audience. In fact, the truth is more nuanced, since the costs and emissions from hosting and distributing digital media can be high.

One can also question whether it’s truly a binary choice. With interactive PDFs or web-based user experiences (web UX), the layout and design stage is somewhat similar to that of a printed publication, but with no printing and delivery step to follow, production time and costs are reduced. As the Pangaia example above shows, you can cost-effectively produce a short print run for selected readers while still primarily distributing the content digitally.

Really, the choice comes down to your marketing preferences and your desired audience impact.

The environmental impact of digital reports

Digital reports allow for a greater range of rich media in your impact report. As with the Tesco example shown above, videos and interactive elements can make a report more engaging for certain audiences. Additionally, digital files can also be viewed an infinite number of times which can reduce your cost-per-audience impression. 

That said, there are ongoing costs associated with hosting a webpage or file online. These can add up significantly if you include videos and other data-intensive files to your report.

The long term storage of digital files produces emissions due to energy consumption. Every time someone loads a digital webpage and every day that data is stored, that increases the energy consumption of the report.

In theory, a very widely-used digital report could produce a greater carbon footprint than a finite print run – since, once the print has shipped, the climate impact ceases to increase.

Printed reports: a sustainable option if done correctly

If emissions is your number-one priority in your choice of print vs. digital comms, the decision comes down to whether you expect each recipient to read the document once or many times, and how many people you expect to access it.

Print produces both production emission and transport emissions, like any manufactured product. But for a relatively small-volume, highly-creative production such as The Food Fight, the carbon emissions per impression could quite feasibly be lower in print, since it’s a creative, high-end production which readers may return to many times. And of course, carbon emissions can be offset and the product can be recycled when no longer needed.

In practice though, deciding to print is more likely to be marketing-led – and the versatility of print also offers a wide range of ways to convey one’s brand values, and imply your sustainability as a business.

Sir Kensington’s created their report in the format of a magazine, using colourful illustrations and down-to-earth language to help tie their impact to a friendly and approachable brand identity. They also printed on 100% recycled paper, further underscoring the brand’s environmental credentials.

Aston Martin’s Racing Green report looks and feels like a coffee table book, with materials and design to match. It lends it the feel of the kind of high-end car publication that the brand’s customers will connect to.

Conclusion: to print or not to print?

Impact reports give you an opportunity to make a statement about your organisation’s environmental credentials. The inescapable irony is that the report itself will have some environmental impact, however it’s produced.

As with all responsibly-produced consumer products, the key is to minimise and control that impact wherever possible, and to clearly communicate to the customer or audience. Being transparent in this way is valued highly by certain cohorts of customers, all the more by customers of brands which have consciously positioned around their environmental and social impact.

Whether you choose print or digital for your company reports, Park|Graphius can help with both. Our in-house studio offers page creation, , financial typesetting and artworking services for print and digital reports alike. To find out more about what we can do for your impact report, get in touch with us here.