Best Practices in Sustainability Reporting : The Results of an Exercise by Charlton College of Business Project Team Management Students

This white paper focuses on a need in sustainability reporting to engage in best practices on how to report from a stakeholder perspective. Sustainability reports are created by organizations to report their economic, social, governance and environmental practices and impacts to their stakeholders. A key stakeholder to many organizations is the generation of students in universities. During a course on Project Team Management at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Charlton College of Business, students underwent investigation and analysis of corporate and university reports. As a result of this exercise 12 best practices for all sustainability reports were generated from the student stakeholder perspective. Students identified the practices of employee engagement, definitions, stakeholders and materiality matrices, PDF and online versions, external assurance, benchmarks and goals, organizational pictures aligned with goals, data graphs, quick links and table of contents, executive summaries, language use and a GRI Index as their recommended best practices