GRI’s web-based scoring platform in five languages hosted 800 reports initially entered in the competition. Readers were asked to score reports of interest to them on a scale of 1 to 5 along five criteria:

·        Materiality: The report covers the issues that are most relevant and important to the company/organization

·        Stakeholder inclusiveness: the report is focused on the most important stakeholders and is addressing their concerns

·        Sustainability Context: Degree to which the report explains the company/organization’s own performance in relation to data about broader sustainability trends.

·        Completeness: Scope of the report enabling readers to assess the organization’s performance.

·        Quality: Comparability, accuracy, timeliness, clarity, reliability, balance, quality of the information provided in the report.

Readers were able to assign unique weights to these criteria so that their scores not only reflected how well they thought the report met the criteria, but also which criteria were most important to them.

To determine the Final Report Score (FRS) the average weight of the attributes (as uniquely determined by each reader) was multiplied by the average score readers assigned each attribute. Then all five attributes were added up – resulting in the FRS.