By Jacob Page, Consultant
This week we launched our third annual Impact Report. Reasons for this include transparency, accountability, and avoiding insincerity. A business that frequently communicates about environmental sustainability and social impact for clients ought also communicate about its own impact – positive or negative.
But the case for transparency goes beyond sincerity, and well beyond communications practice. More than a means through which to approach comms, transparency can be an impactful end, in and of itself. Done right, it can mitigate risk, build trust, and keep organisations on the straight and narrow.
Transparency isn’t the reserve of purposeful companies who do it well – your Patagonias, Oatlys and Tony’s Chocoloneys. Many companies feel they lack the moral authority that seemingly affords businesses like these the luxury of transparency.
But what is expected of businesses is changing. Patience is wearing thin across the board; comms teams no longer score points for future-gazing about responsible supply chains, or for unsubstantiated green (over)claims. A suite of impending regulation is certain to make this more than ‘just’ reputational.
At the same time, people have access to an unprecedented wealth of information: open-sourced, detailed, instant, shareable, crisis-initiating data.
Then, it is exceedingly difficult, and certainly not a strategy, to ‘dam’ the information stream. Silence shouldn’t be misidentified as the inverse of transparency. It isn’t risk mitigation. It is only ever a rolling wager that nobody finds out what you’re not disclosing. Nowadays, these feel like long odds.
So, the question isn’t whether an organisation has the luxury to be transparent. It’s whether to be transparent on one’s own terms, or have those terms dictated by others. Scary, granted. But that fear doesn’t negate the risk of silence. Meaningful transparency allows you to ‘own’ your impact – warts and all – and perhaps exercise some control over how your business is perceived in the process.
Transparency is an end in another sense: it is a way of building relationships with those who expect more, because it is a precondition of accountability.
Transparency means being open to external scrutiny, which compels accountability, and, over time, can build trust and push organisations to do and be better. Even in the absence of measurable impact, transparency begets accountability — so much was clear from the positive reaction to IKEA announcing its failure to reach fleet electrification targets last year.
Look at Blurred’s Impact Report. We’re doing quite well. But we took 14 business flights in 2025, more than in 2024. We still lack the processes and data to estimate the emissions of non-aviation-based business travel. Our client disclosure is aggregated to the industry level.
But by publishing all this, we are making public the tools to assess our progress. Hopefully, this reporting empowers those who would wish to hold us to account to do just that.
Finally, in disclosing this information we reduce the ways in which we could overclaim our positive impact, or downplay our negative impact. It forces us to assess our progress (or lack thereof) and ultimately, to practice what we preach. Therefore, transparency becomes an active mechanism for change, not just a principle of communication.
So, since we’re being transparent, if you’re reading this and wondering how your organisation could be more open, we’d love to chat.