CRO POV: Corporate Survey Fatigue?

By Jay Whitehead

If you are IBM or Citigroup or any of the world’s 50 most highly capitalized companies, your finance, investor relations, human resources, corporate social responsibility, citizenship, communications and marketing functions are asked to complete 300 to 1,000 surveys, questionnaires or regulatory reports every year. Most of the time, big companies comply with these requests; sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes not.

Anyone who has ever completed a big-time consumer or business survey knows what a burden these things can be. Back in the mid-1980s when I was at PC Magazine, I can remember completing one that took me an entire weekend.

We at The CRO don’t help this survey scope-creep at all. After all, we encourage people to respond to KLD Analytics’ questionnaires. The result of the KLD survey is the 100 Best Corporate Citizens list, which appears in our Jan/Feb 2007 CRO Magazine. And we will have several other survey-based features throughout the year as well. We are part of the problem, and only making it worse.

New requirements, such as the Global Reporting Initiative, are attempting to simplify the plight of the corporate reporting process by being one single repository for standard results. Call it the financial reporting equivalent of a nutrition label.

While the GRI has been around for a few years, it seems to have picked up most of its traction in Europe and the developing world. North American companies are coming on board slowly, hindered mostly by the fatigue of all the competing surveys and reports.

Another company, One Report, has created a nice tool that allows companies to fill in one report (hence the product’s clever name) that answers many surveys’ needs. I have spoken with two customers of One Report, and they are enthusiastic about the product’s streamlining impact. Both these companies are very large, which leads me to wonder how many mid-cap companies have a problem that is solved by One Report.

Jay Falk, the visionary entrepreneur who started One Report, says that financial reporting is only one part of the equation—and the smallest part. There will be, he says, a massive increase in need for reporting on supply chain issues. Supply chain reporting may be the next big thing, and next big source of corporate survey fatigue.

For our part, we’ll continue to be a source of survey stress. After all, that’s the media’s job. But the good news is that by providing stakeholders more comparative information, we help companies use CR to differentiate themselves, sell product, raise capital and recruit talent. So maybe the added stress will be worth it.

Tomorrow: A 4-Letter Acronym You Should Know: OCEG