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

Appendix 7AMethodology for Analyzing 124 Company Integrated Reports

We analyzed 124 reports—24 from South African companies and 100 from companies in other countries. Reports were selected if they were:

1. Self-declared to be an integrated report
2. Published by a company of any size listed on a stock exchange
3. Published in 2013 (for the 2012 fiscal year)
4. Published in English
5. Publicly available
6. Available for download in a PDF format

Companies producing the report could be from any geographic region and industry sector, and they could use any reporting framework. Reports meeting our criteria were sourced from Global Reporting Initiative's (GRI) Sustainability Disclosure Database¹ on October 17, 2013.

The analysis team used the “Consultation Draft of The International <IR> Framework”² (Consultation Draft) issued in July 2013 as the basis for developing the evaluation methodology, recognizing that all of the reports analyzed were published prior to the release of “The International <IR> Framework”³ (<IR> Framework) in December 2013. Twenty factors were used for scoring reports. Seven of these came from the Consultation Draft's “Content Elements.” Even though the Consultation Draft was used for our report assessment, the Content Element names are the same as those later used in the <IR> Framework.

• Organizational overview and external environment
• Governance
• Business model
• Risks and opportunities
• Strategy and resource allocation
• Performance
• Outlook

The Consultation Draft's “Six Capitals” ...