Companies continue to invest in CSR

Monday, March 01, 2010

Despite the financial crisis companies continue to invest and communicate CSR on their website. 95 percent of Europe's 150 largest listed companies offer a separate CSR section on their website. Of the 500 largest companies, the proportion is 86 percent, which is similar to last year.

H&H Webranking are now finished with the third edition of H&H Spotlight Report CSR. More companies have changed their mindset, when it comes to the level of importance for CSR, by putting the CSR section of the front page on the corporate website. A majority of the companies have placed their CSR section at level 1 or level 2 in the navigation structure. The increasing proportion of the FT 150 companies with a CSR section at premium level indicates that larger companies consider it more and more important to communicate CSR and therefore ensure that visitors can find the section easily.

Development over time

H&H Webranking first introduced a separate CSR section in the ranking protocol in 2000. Over the intervening decade, the number and importance of CSR related criteria, has increased concurrently with the increasing expectations from the financial market. Greater awareness has resulted in an increased demand for more specific and measurable information.  The financial market does not settle for wide and vague discussions about the environment; they want hard facts and results, featuring the companies’ specific environmental impact together with environmental targets.

The high demand for environmental information is continuing; environmental targets followed by information about relevant environmental impact is considered by the capital market to be the most important CSR information on a corporate website. A Code of Conduct and information on certified environmental management system is also highly requested, as well as having a CSR report and using GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) as a reporting standard.

Information not directly related to the company’s core business, such as sponsoring and charity involvement, is considered less important by the capital market. However, this information is still useful as it promotes a positive, involved and proactive image of the company in society. It should be presented in a subsection of the website’s CSR section.

Netherland in the top

By looking at different countries, companies in Netherlands, receive the highest average score followed by Finland and Denmark. For more information about your company’s CSR-score please send an email to

The focus of H&H Spotlight Report CSR 2009 is to analyze how European companies communicate CSR on their corporate websites and how they meet the demands from the capital market. This is the third consecutive year Hallvarsson & Halvarsson present a report on this theme, continuing our tradition of thorough and in depth analysis of the newest trends and future outlooks in this area of corporate communications. Another purpose of the survey is to learn and gain inspiration from the best companies in Europe in this field. We are proud to offer best practice examples from some of these companies in this report, all-in-all to further help and inspire companies to progress and improve its CSR communication.

More information:

Read more about our CSR spotlight report here.