You’ve spent months on it. The data’s been checked and rechecked, the narrative’s been debated over, and finally, it’s out. And then what? For a lot of organisations, the answer is: not much. The annual report gets filed, and by April nobody outside the reporting team remembers what was in it.
It’s a familiar story for a lot of reporting teams. In our latest webcast, Monica Keaney, Global ESG Manager at Carlsberg Group, talks to us about how her team turns a dense, once-a-year document into something that gets told all year round – using the Group’s sustainability programme Brewing Tomorrow as the lever.
A programme built to be told, not just filed
For Carlsberg, the introduction of CSRD was a turning point. Their sustainability report used to be one document people could pick up and find what they needed. Once it became a CSRD-compliant report, that changed. It got more detailed, more structured, more thorough – and, Monica admits, significantly harder for the average reader to get through, let alone engage with its content.
This is where Brewing Tomorrow is truly innovative in the reporting world. The programme is built around four clear pillars: Cutting carbon, Protecting nature, Inspiring choice, and Empowering people. Every commitment and target Carlsberg sets sit under one of those four. That structure does more than organise their sustainability reporting. It gives Monica’s team a ready-made shape for telling the story, so they’re never starting from a blank page.
From report to reporting
Monica defines the shift as a move from report to reporting – from a single asset to an ongoing activity. The report ticks the compliance box. But however well it’s made, it was never going to do the job of actually engaging colleagues and external stakeholders on its own. Brewing Tomorrow is what gives structure and strategic direction to that ongoing conversation: on LinkedIn, the website, case stories, internal sustainability ambassadors, all drawing on the same four pillars, all year round.
It’s a shift we’ve been talking about for a while now, and it’s the thinking behind our New Reporting Playbook methodology. It’s reassuring to see the approach being implemented at an organisation the size of Carlsberg, to enhance the wider impact reports are having.
Not just more noise, the right noise
What’s notable is how disciplined Carlsberg are about it. Every piece of ongoing communication is tied back to the data in the report – nothing gets shared just because it sounds good. And they’re not just pulling stories out of the report after it’s published either; while they’re building the report, they’re thinking about which messages they’ll want to tell over the coming year.
This is what we call leading with a data-driven story. It’s approaching the narrative not as something you retrofit once the core chapters of the report are done, but as something that grows out of the data. What does the data actually tell us? Why does it matter to our stakeholders? How does it connect to our bigger commitments?
And Brewing Tomorrow’s pillars give Carlsberg the framework to keep that bigger story moving – one focused, evidence-based piece at a time, throughout the year.
Watch the full conversation with Monica Keaney to hear more about how Carlsberg’s sustainability team is putting this into practice.
