Beyond the bottom line: sustainability reporting means finding a greater sense of purpose.

• Author: Peterson, Eric

Financial reporting only tells part of the story. The raw data of a quarterly report tells us nothing of a company's conscience. Just because a company hits all the fiscal targets doesn't mean it's a straight shooter.

But a new breed of reporting has emerged to fill the gaps, covering a company's carbon emissions, energy use and community involvement - in short everything that's lacking from a typical quarterly report.

"This pattern has emerged over the past 10 years of companies reporting more and more, from environment to social and now even ethics," says Jeff Yorzyk, a senior consultant at the Boulder headquarters of Five Winds International, a sustainability-focused management consulting firm. He says Nike's child-labor expose in the early 1990s was the PR debacle that catalyzed today's "constant demand for transparency" from shareholders.

As far as the nuts and bolts of reporting environmental and social initiatives, "There's a million ways to do it," Yorzyk says. "It depends on the company. There's also the data-collection issue."

He points to the Global Reporting Initiative as the emerging gold standard for guidelines on how to report on sustainability and other nonfinancial aspects of the business. "It's a very thorough methodology," he says. "It's a good place to start."

Yorzyk's two primary questions for clients are "What do I report?" and "Where do I get the data?" Also important: "What story do I have to tell?" On the last question, Yorzyk's advice: "Allow your company to be human."

"You can't have a junior person running the reporting," he adds. "You really need to have a high-level person driving it."

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One of Yorzyk's clients, Boulder-based GoLite, took this to heart: Co-founder and Chief Sustainability Officer Kim Coupounas guided the ultra-light outdoor gear manufacturer's first GRI-based report. Released in January 2010 (Coupounas says the plan is to update it every other year), the 157-page report covers everything from operational structure to labor practices to environmental initiatives, earning an A+ from GRI for transparency.

The report "shows that you're walking your talk," Coupounas says. "There are no regulations on most of this stuff. You're not required to give back to the community. You're not required to source materials that are environmentally sustainable. (The report) forces you to get more serious and rigid how you set goals and how you measure progress toward those goals."

One such...