Annual Report 2023/Story: Reports to Develop Our Operations
In this story, we describe how the work of the association has been able to develop through investment in a solid decision guidance document, in the form of reports. These reports focus on both the association's climate impact and its diversity. The reports highlight the strengths and weaknesses in these areas and provide guidance on how the organization's impact on society can be as positive as possible.
A requirement for improving operations is to identify what currently works well and what does not. Therefore, the association has, in recent years, actively worked on developing reports aimed at improving and making the association's operations more sustainable in various areas.
One such report is the climate impact report. For the 2022 annual meeting, a climate impact report was developed for the first time. It was, however, based on a questionable methodology with unclear data, making the conclusions difficult to interpret. In 2022, we received help from the consulting firm Deloitte, as part of their pro bono work, to improve the methodology and data collection. This enabled us to produce a significantly more accurate report for the 2023 annual meeting, which in turn is a prerequisite for accurate conclusions and analyses.
The majority of the work consisted of improving the data within the procurement category. In the initial report, this category accounted for a significant portion of the association's emissions. However, due to the methodology relying on economic rather than actual data, it was often misleading. In the 2023 report, this was revised, and the conclusion became that while the procurement category turned out to be a significantly smaller portion than before, it still is the largest category in factual terms. This also means that a significant portion of our sustainability gains can be made within procurement.
During the year, we also had meetings with Wikimedia Switzerland to share our experiences and thoughts, as they are interested in similar work. There are many similarities in how work is executed in Wikimedia associations, it is therefore interesting to explore whether it is possible and desirable to develop similar reports using a similar methodology. This could save time and resources since we would not need to reinvent the wheel, it would also allow us to continuously learn from each other as the analyses often are complex with many gray areas and interpretations.
In the 2023 climate impact report, there was also an initiative to take concrete action to reduce emissions based on the data. Therefore, we have moved content from our servers hosted by Bahnhof, who cannot provide sustainability data, to Glesys, from whom we can obtain data on the actual emissions generated by our servers. We have also started purchasing a compilation of our travel emissions from our travel agency to save time and obtain better data.
Connected to the sustainability work regarding the climate, we have also started working on a report in the area of social sustainability, namely a diversity report. In 2023, the association's first diversity report was developed, but similar to the work on an ecological sustainability report, there were significant challenges in producing the report, including determining which boundaries to set.
We have, despite this, gained several important insights that will influence our priorities and work going forward. For instance, the majority of the association's members live in large cities, and there is a significant overrepresentation of men, although our data is highly incomplete due to gender being voluntary information to share. The average age is also unexpectedly high, with the largest age group falling between 72-81 years, and the association has very few younger members. Despite our efforts with the education sector over several years and a digitally-based operation involving high-tech projects, we have evidently not convinced a younger demographic to become members. This compels us to reflect on how we can work more systematically and qualitatively with membership recruitment in all aspects of our operations, as it clearly does not happen on its own. However, it will require efforts around additional data collection to confirm initial insights before significant changes in operations take place.
The diversity report aims to visualize the composition of the association's members. With the right data at hand, we can set goals for diversity within the association and based on those goals plan activities to reach, engage, and include individuals from groups where there is currently a gap.
The report developed for 2022 was completed in the fall of 2023. This means that any recommendations derived from the report, which the association views as worthy of further consideration, will be pursued in 2024. This will happen alongside the initiation/implementation of the process to develop the 2023 report.
Some of the challenges encountered by the association when producing the report included difficulties in compiling statistics from the CRM system we use. Multiple runs were necessary to obtain accurate data, and the data required manual adjustments in order to be used as measurement indexes. Hopefully, this issue has been resolved by 2023, as data for the new year was extracted at the end of 2023, based on all the parameters mentioned in the 2022 report. In the 2022 report, some of the numbers had to be extracted after the turn of the year (i.e., during 2023), which resulted in misleading data.
The goal of measuring the same parameters from year to year is to promote the opportunity to follow the diversity efforts being made (new measurement indexes may be added in the future). It is also important to remember that statistics indicating increased diversity do not necessarily show whether the practical conditions are in place to maintain increased engagement, or whether inclusive practices are in place when new individuals join.
For this reason, the report highlights a number of areas that deserve further investigation, so that we can see if they can and should be included in our future activities and reports.
These two reports give us a better data-driven basis for developing our work in the future, and working with the reports has led to important reflections and many new ideas for our activities.
However, one insight is that it has been very time-consuming and expensive to develop the climate impact report. Given how small our emissions are in the context, the question has arisen about how to find a reasonable balance between the required investments and the benefits achieved. For both reports, it becomes a trade-off between investing resources in developing the report or investing the same resources in spreading knowledge about diversity and sustainability through activities such as writing workshops or uploading relevant data to Wikidata.
An idea for the future is therefore to regularly develop the climate impact report, although every second or third year, allowing for comparisons over time with fewer investments. However, regarding the diversity report, it remains reasonable to continue with annual reports, at least while measurements indexes are being developed and focus areas for improvement are being identified.
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