The Integrated Reporting Movement: Meaning, Momentum, Motives, and Materiality

Chapter 8Reporting Websites

Today, companies use their websites for a multitude of purposes: to market their products, advertise, engage with customers and employees, post important information on a real-time basis, enhance their image, and reinforce their brand—not to mention to sell products themselves. In comparison, how a company uses its website for corporate reporting purposes is fairly narrow. Because it is an increasingly significant channel through which the company can communicate with shareholders and other stakeholders, however, it is an important one. By capitalizing on their reporting websites, companies can move beyond the paper constraints of an integrated report in order to create a platform for the company's integrated reporting—a more multidimensional, interactive, and engaging form of communication. In the previous chapter, we saw that most companies producing integrated reports were doing little to support these documents online in a way that would make the information they contain more useful and usable. While the Internet has the potential to dramatically enhance integrated reporting and integrated thinking, it can also do so for more traditional corporate reporting. To the extent this is happening, it is reasonable to expect that large companies have the resources to do so.

To assess how the world's most sophisticated companies are leveraging the Internet for corporate reporting purposes, we studied the websites of the largest 500 companies in the world: ...