Sustainability storytelling – how to cut through in 2025

Sustainability communications are becoming more complicated.

Political headwinds are making companies more cautious about speaking out. At the same time, AI-powered search is raising the stakes for transparency: if you don’t tell your own story, someone else will.

New reporting regulations, such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive in Europe, are turning corporate communications into a compliance challenge.

Bowen Craggs hosted a Chatham House rules roundtable in partnership with creative communications consultancy Emperor in April. We gathered corporate digital communications experts from some of Europe’s top companies to discuss what the new sustainability regulation rules mean for corporate websites and social media channels, and what best practice in sustainability storytelling looks like here in 2025.

Here are the key takeaways.

Provide rich data in HTML and Excel, as well as PDF

More often than not, sustainability narratives take a static format, such as long annual report PDFs.

“We get very focused on producing the annual report, and then we end up with everything in a big report and all our stories stuck in a 300-page PDF that nobody actually reads,”– roundtable participant

Professional audiences, such as environmental analysts and investors, still tend to prefer downloadable PDFs, but younger audiences, customers and jobseekers expect interactive, easily navigable digital content, as well as stories that ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’.

Bowen Craggs recommends: sprinkle sustainability content from PDF reports across the corporate website in more accessible and engaging ways. This approach not only cuts costs through asset re-use but also makes the information more digestible for all audiences, from investors to prospective employees.

“None of us have ample cash anymore, so re-using our assets is important.” – roundtable participant 

Best practice: The highest performing companies in the Corporate Digital Communications Index present sustainability performance data in HTML format, such as Mondelez’s ESG Data Sheets, which also has the option to download data in Excel and PDF formats.

Clarifying the complex

“We have an issue with simplifying the complicated. We work with lots of subject matter experts and different teams, so trying to get content that is digestible can be an issue” – roundtable participant  

The corporate website, and storytelling, is the bridge between the technical know-how of the reporting team, and the ‘generalist’ customer or jobseeker.  

Different audiences want data, information and stories in different formats.

Insight: One company Bowen Craggs works with uses an innovative method to work with internal teams behind the scenes: story request forms. These allow the reporting teams to pitch ideas for stories and directly feed into content creation. The corporate digital team shaped the story request form to ensure that all the elements needed for an effective story are collected, including which audiences to take into account.

Best practice: take already-approved key data points from the annual report and present them on the site in infographic format, as BP does on its HMTL annual report summary page.

Make your corporate website the “mothership of truth” on contentious topics  

AI search is turbo-charging the importance of a deep, content-rich corporate website. If you don't provide detailed facts about your business, or set out your positions clearly, then generative AI search will turn to other sources that do.

Staying silent on contentious issues may feel like the safe option, but it will leave a dangerous vacuum that will be filled by information sources outside your control. 

Using clear and direct language is increasingly important for AI search. A good way to do this is through FAQs that use naturalistic language – the language that real stakeholders use to ask questions about your company.

Bowen Craggs recommends: create a dedicated “Policy and Positions” page to clearly explain your stance on all contentious topics relevant to your company: the mothership of truth. This is important not just for stakeholder clarity, but also for AI search engine optimisation.

Best practice: Amazon addresses a range of big topics on the a “Our Positions” page in the “Who we are” section of the corporate website, with clear statements on where they stand. 

Leverage the interactive power of the web for storytelling  

The web gives corporate digital communicators a unique platform to tell stories in immersive and digestible ways not possible using other media formats.

Tell specific stories that are materially relevant to your business, rather than trying to tell stories about big topics such as climate change (unless it makes sense for your company to do so).

Bowen Craggs recommends: Be it selfie-style videos directly from employees, or interactive maps, the web is an opportunity to present information in different ways for different audiences. Take inspiration from online news outlets with compelling data visualisation techniques, and experiment with different formats that go beyond PDF for sustainability stories.

Best practice: Unilever lets visitors explore its palm oil supply chain through interactive maps.