Offering a Comprehensive Suite of Tools
The Value Reporting Foundation offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to help businesses and investors develop a shared understanding of value and how it is created, preserved, or eroded.
- The Integrated Thinking Principles, which guide board and management planning and decision making.
- The Integrated Reporting Framework, which provides principles-based, multi-capital guidance for comprehensive corporate reporting.
- SASB Standards, which are a powerful tool to inform investor decision making when embedded in investment tools and processes.
To learn how leading businesses use the <IR> Framework and SASB Standards together, please see the Complementary Tools paper.
Integrated Reporting Framework
The Integrated Reporting Framework is a principles-based, multi-capital, framework that is used to accelerate the adoption of integrated reporting across the world.
Integrated reporting brings together material information about an organization’s strategy, governance, performance and prospects in a way that reflects the commercial, social and environmental context within which it operates. It provides a clear and concise representation of how the organization creates value now and in the future.
An integrated report demonstrates the robust integrated thinking of the organization and be informed by comprehensive metrics and disclosure topics via use of the SASB Standards.
Integrated Thinking Principles
Integrated thinking drives an improved understanding of how value is created, to enhance decision-making and actions by boards and management. It is a management approach for thinking holistically about the resources and relationships the organization uses or affects, and the dependencies and trade-offs between them as value is created.
The Value Reporting Foundation’s Integrated Thinking Principles (‘Principles’) provide a structured approach to adopting integrate thinking. They are designed to be embedded into an organization’s business model and applied across key activities overseen by the Board and managed by the senior management team. The Principles, which are are interconnected, are implemented on three levels: the first comprises questions to the Board and CEO on how widely each Principle has been adopted across the organization; the second offers the opportunity to test how deeply the Principles have been embedded into the organization; and the third consists of management tools, practices and processes to bring integrated thinking to life.
SASB Standards
SASB Standards provide detailed industry-specific disclosure topics and metrics to inform what you include in your integrated report, lending insight into the subset of sustainability issues that are most closely tied to an organization’s ability to create long-term value for investors.
The Standards address sustainability-related risks and opportunities reasonably likely to affect an organization’s financial condition (i.e., its balance sheet), operating performance (i.e., its income statement), or risk profile (i.e. its market valuation and cost of capital).
With 77 industry standards available, SASB Standards provide the comparable and reliable data sought by investors. SASB Standards can be used to strengthen your integrated report using the Framework.