CSRD killed the sustainability story. The front-end report is bringing it back.

Three weeks before a sustainability report goes to print, a senior manager opens the draft for the first time, reads ten pages, and asks where all the good stuff went. Why does this read like a phone book? Where's the part about what we actually do?

Because that's what it is now. A phone book. By regulation.

We've had this conversation more times than I can count this year. The Sustainability Statement complies with every ESRS requirement. The data is right. The auditors are happy. And the person inside the company who actually cares about how it reads is, quite reasonably, asking where the story went.

It went into compliance. And it's not coming back.

What changed

For about 20 years, sustainability reports were communications documents. Companies told stories about their work in the community, their progress on climate, the things they were proud of. The reports were uneven, often self-congratulatory, sometimes useful. But they were communications.

Then CSRD, and with it ESRS arrived, and reporting became a compliance exercise.

The regulation is doing what it was meant to do. It's stopping the boasting and the greenwashing. It's forcing companies to disclose things they previously left out. It's making the numbers comparable. All good.

But the side effect is that the document is now technical and largely unreadable. And inside companies, ownership has shifted. Finance teams are running the process. Compliance and legal teams are reviewing every line. The communications team, if they're involved at all, arrives late, looks at the draft, and says some version of we can't put this on the website.

By then, it's too late.

The disintegrated report

We wrote about this on the Koan blog a few years ago, before any of it was happening. The thesis was simple: when you compress everything into one regulated document, the document stops doing the thing companies originally used it for. It stops communicating.

That's now playing out. Companies are realising they need somewhere else for the story to live. Some are publishing two reports: the Sustainability Statement for the regulators, and a separate, shorter, reader-friendly version for everyone else. So has our client Action, with what they call the Action Update. The Sustainability Statement complies. The Action Update communicates. Different audiences, different documents, same underlying truth.

Others are writing what we'd call a front end: 10 to 20 pages that sit ahead of the Sustainability Statement and tell the story the statement can't. Images, graphics, accessible language, a clearer narrative.

Both approaches work. Neither is right for every company. Which brings us to the question almost nobody is asking.

Who is this report for?

When we sit down with clients to start a project, we ask who the report is for. The answer, more often than not, is everyone.

What they actually mean is we'll put it on the website. They've confused access with audience.

This is the most expensive mistake in sustainability reporting. If you're trying to talk to everyone, you end up talking to nobody. Different audiences want different things, and they want them in different places. A consumer-facing company writing for the people who buy its products in supermarkets needs a different document than a B2B company replying to tenders and RFPs. Same compliance back, completely different front. Same data, completely different story.

If you're a B2C company, the front end probably belongs on your website, broken up across pages, supported by social. If you're B2B, you may want a 10-page PDF you can attach to procurement responses. If your main audience is investors, you may not need a front end at all, just a tighter executive summary in the Sustainability Statement itself (the recent ESRS Omnibus now allows this, which is a quiet admission that the statements were becoming impossible to navigate).

The point is that the shape of the front end follows from the audience. And you can't decide on the shape until you've decided who it's for. Most companies skip this step, because thinking about audiences takes time, and time costs money, and the whole reporting process already feels like a sunk cost they want behind them.

I understand the reluctance. I just think it's the wrong instinct.

The trap

Here's the part of the conversation that's been missing.

The Sustainability Statement is dry, technical, and full of disclosures companies would, frankly, rather not make. Gender pay gaps. Workforce statistics in places where things aren't great. Pollution data. Climate transition plans that don't quite add up yet. The regulation forces these out into the open, which was the entire point.

But the front end isn't regulated. It can say whatever the company wants it to say.

You can see where this goes.

The risk is that the Sustainability Statement becomes the place where the uncomfortable truths are buried, in full knowledge that almost nobody will read it, while the front end becomes a glossy 15-page brag sheet about the good news. Volunteering days. Solar panels. Carbon-neutral product lines. Awards. The exact greenwashing pattern that CSRD was designed to stop, just rebuilt with extra steps.

I want to be honest about where Koan stands on this, because I think a lot of agencies won't be.

We've turned down work where companies wanted us to write something that covered things up. We had a small client a few months ago who wanted a human rights policy. We told them we could write one, but the policy on its own wasn't the point. What mattered was implementation, training, grievance mechanisms, the systems that make the policy real. They didn't want to hear it. They just wanted the text. We lost the business.

No regrets on our side. A human rights policy that nobody implements is worse than no policy, because it gives the company a false sense that it's done the work.

The same applies to front ends. A front end that only tells the good news is a marketing brochure dressed up as reporting. Audiences notice. They walk into a discount retailer and already suspect that somewhere in the supply chain, corners are being cut. The story has to address that suspicion, not pretend it doesn't exist.

A good front end gives readers the big picture, which means the picture, not the highlights reel. The strengths and the weaknesses. The progress and the gaps. The strategy and where it's struggling. The numbers as proof, not decoration.

That's the article you can put your name on. The other one will follow you around for years.

What a good front end actually does

A few things we've learned from doing this work:

A good front end starts with the audience. Decide who's reading it before you decide what's in it.

A good front end complements the Sustainability Statement, it doesn't replace it. The statement carries the detail and the regulatory load. The front end gives the big picture and points readers to the statement when they want to go deeper.

A good front end is consistent. Style, layout, and language fit with the rest of the report. The auditors will look at this too. So will the readers, who notice when the front end and the statement seem to be describing two different companies.

A good front end addresses weaknesses. Not buried in a footnote, not phrased into uselessness. Out in the open, with the response, with what the company is doing about it. This is the part that builds credibility.

A good front end uses fewer than 20 pages. If it's longer, it isn't a front end anymore, it's a second report, and you should ask whether you actually need two reports.

A good front end stays in its lane. It's a single, focused piece of communication for a specific audience, separate from the regulatory document and from the website.

Where to start

If you're sitting with a Sustainability Statement that doesn't tell your story, and you're wondering whether you need a front end, start with two questions.

Who is this for?

What do they already think about us?

If you can answer both, you're ahead of most of the companies we work with. If you can't, that's your starting point, and it's the conversation we'd want to have before writing anything at all.