Press Release
The Making of a Corporate Citizenship Report

Caesars launched our seventh annual corporate citizenship report, “Connecting for #Citizenship,” highlighting how Caesars provides economic and social benefits for employees, guests and communities while also advancing environmental stewardship. We are proud of the progress we’ve made – you can read about everything from the new “Meetings for Good” menu of nonprofit event opportunities to how we engage our wonderful employees. You’ll find stories, data and this year, since social media is an important way to connect with employees and guests about sustainability, we’re sharing what our social media followers think about Caesars by including their tweets.

So how does a report like this come together? We wanted to give you a bit of a behind the scenes look.

The Process

Though it may seem straightforward, putting together a citizenship report is much more than thinking back on the previous year (our report covers 2015 and the first half of 2016), writing about key citizenship initiatives and including some pictures. Since reporting is a huge task, like many companies, we work with an external consultant. Our consultant conducts interviews with people throughout Caesars, representing departments from sustainability, human resources, the Caesars Foundation, learning and development and, most importantly, from our properties and CodeGreen teams. The aim is to gather stores and data on how they’ve driven citizenship.

In addition to the 100+ page report, we produce 15 state fact sheets, which are essentially mini-reports that depend on more than 100 people providing us with up-to-the-minute data.

“Since the citizenship report and fact sheets are public-facing disclosure documents of interest to a wide range of stakeholders, including investors, it’s really important that all the information is accurate,” says Gwen Migita, Caesars’ vice president of sustainability and corporate citizenship. “To ensure accuracy, all the staff members we’ve interviewed review what is written about their department’s involvement in citizenship, so everything has been read by a couple hundred sets of eyeballs before it’s released.”

The Report

We follow the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework for putting together the report, which is the most widely-used corporate citizenship reporting guide in the world. The GRI helps companies focus in on the issues most important to our business and our stakeholders, while also ensuring that our report responds to what our stakeholders expect to hear from our company. For example, issues like responsible gaming, responsible meetings and human trafficking are specific to our industry so it’s important to share our progress with our stakeholders.

We also report on issues that are important for any company, such as delivering economic value (in 2015, we delivered $4.4 million enterprise-wide of value for every $10 million in revenue, triple the estimated average of U.S. corporations), addressing climate change, and ensuring our suppliers use socially and environmentally responsible practices.

Reporting should be much more than a means to an end; it’s actually a great way to reflect on our citizenship strategy, engage our colleagues around initiatives they’re passionate about, and celebrate our progress against short and long term goals. For the data geeks among us, it’s also a chance to see the numbers we’ve been tracking through various software solutions come to life in the report!

Throughout the report, we share tweets from stakeholders – team members, nonprofit partners, casino and hotel guests, and community members. We thought this was a fun way to show how seriously we take stakeholder engagement: we are listening to what people think about Caesars and we know they want us to have a positive impact.

Take a look at the full report to learn more about our #Citizenship efforts – and please tell us what you think by tweeting at us @CitizenCaesars or emailing us at [email protected]. Enjoy!