Most companies know their financial data inside out. Their ESG data too.
But ask them who actually reads their annual report and what those readers really want — and the answer is usually a shrug.
That’s the problem. Organisations spend months producing some of their most important assets based largely on assumptions. About the audience. About what matters to them. About how they want to engage.
And those assumptions, more often than not, are wrong.
Why it keeps happening
It’s not for lack of effort. There are real structural reasons this problem persists.
Compliance frameworks like CSRD are built for assurance. They’re not designed for communication or engagement, so they push companies towards one-size-fits-all formats that work for auditors but not much else.
Reporting also tends to sit in silos — driven by finance or investor relations, with communications treated as an afterthought. There’s rarely a single team with both the responsibility and the appetite to ask bigger questions.
And then there’s the calendar. The report goes out in Q1. By the time teams reconvene in August or September, everyone’s heads-down again. There simply isn’t time to stop, look back, and ask whether any of it actually landed.
So you produce, you publish, and you hope for the best. As Nanette puts it: hope is not a strategy.
Start with the who
The fix starts not with the report itself, but with the audience.
That means treating audience insight with the same rigour as financial or ESG data. Surveys, stakeholder interviews, analytics — these aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re the baseline for creating something people actually care about. If you don’t know who you’re talking to or what they want to know, you’re not communicating. You’re broadcasting.
And the audience is broader than most teams realise. Investors and auditors, yes — but also employees, future talent, customers, partners, and the media. All of them have a stake in understanding your performance. Most of them are being left behind by the current format.
Design for engagement, not just compliance
A 200-page PDF satisfies regulators. It doesn’t do much for everyone else.
Regulatory compliance and stakeholder engagement are two different things, and they need two different approaches. Once you know what your audiences want to know, the job is to meet them where they are — in formats that fit how they actually consume information.
That might mean an interactive website. Short videos. Regular posts across your social channels. The medium matters less than the principle: take what’s valuable in your report and turn it into something people genuinely want to engage with.
Turn reporting into a conversation
The most effective reporting doesn’t just go out into the world. It invites a response.
That means creating real opportunities for stakeholders — not just investors — to ask questions, challenge assumptions and engage with the information you’re sharing. Live Q&As with your executives. Direct dialogue on social. AI-driven chat functions on your website.
Trust is built through dialogue, not monologue. And that dialogue shouldn’t wait for the annual cycle. The organisations making the most of their reporting are keeping the conversation going all year round.
The payoff is bigger than you think
When stakeholders feel like your reporting was made for them, they engage. And when they engage, you learn more about what they care about.
That’s not just a nice outcome. It’s a feedback loop. It makes the next report better. It builds trust continuously, not just once a year in a PDF that nobody opens.
Compliance is still the starting point. But it shouldn’t be the finish line.
If you missed episode 1 then you can catch up here.
