Telling the story of your CSR, honestly

Communicating CSR well means telling people what you funded, what changed and what didn’t, accurately, with respect for the people in the story and credit to the partners who did the work. The law sets a minimum, in the board’s report, on the company’s website and in Form CSR-2, and it limits how far CSR can be used for branding. Everything beyond that is a choice, and honest choices build the trust that makes CSR work.

This guide is for CSR heads and communications teams. It covers what you must disclose, the branding rules, how to avoid overclaiming, how to use numbers, consent and dignity, and the formats that work.

What you must disclose, and where

The rules are in Section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013 and the Companies (CSR Policy) Rules, 2014 (the CSR Rules). These disclosures describe the same projects, so produce them all from one project register. Figures that don’t match between the board’s report, CSR-2 and the website are the easiest problem for a regulator, an auditor or a journalist to spot. See the annual report on CSR, Form CSR-2 and BRSR.

Branding: what the rules allow

Keep acknowledgement modest and proportionate, and never let promotion change who benefits.

Avoiding impact-washing

Impact-washing means claiming more impact than your evidence supports. It is common, because CSR reports are written to impress, and costly when people notice. Watch for:

• Spending presented as impact. “₹10 crore invested in education” says what you paid, not what changed.
• Outputs presented as outcomes. “Five lakh saplings planted” isn’t “four lakh trees alive after two years”.
• Inflated reach. “Lives touched” that count the same person at every event, or everyone in a village.
• Sole credit for shared work. A result that government, other funders and the community also paid for.
• Before and after, without context. Change that would have happened anyway, presented as your effect.
• Only success stories. Silence about what didn’t work makes everything else harder to believe.

Using numbers well

• Give the denominator and the baseline, so readers can judge the size of the change.
• Say who counted, how and when, and date every figure.
• Separate people reached from people who benefited, and count each person once.
• Say “contributed to” when others also paid for the result.
• Round honestly, and give ranges where you are unsure.
• Report what didn’t work, and what you changed as a result.

Our guide to choosing indicators helps you decide what to measure in the first place.

People in your stories: consent and dignity

• Informed consent from everyone who can be identified, in a language they understand, saying where the story will appear and that they can withdraw. Record it.
• Children. Get a parent’s or guardian’s consent, and blur minors’ faces by default. Indian law forbids disclosing the identity of a child victim of a sexual offence (section 23 of the POCSO Act, 2012), and any detail that could identify a child in need of care and protection, a child in conflict with the law, or a child victim or witness (section 74 of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015). Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, processing a child’s data will need verifiable consent from a parent or guardian when the main duties apply from 13 May 2027.
• Dignity. Show people as agents of change, not objects of pity: no images of distress and no staged scenes.
• Location. Remove location data from photographs before you publish them, and never reveal where survivors or other vulnerable people live.
• Real images as evidence. Never present an illustration or an AI-generated image as a picture of your work.

See consent, photos and dignity for the full guidance.

Formats that work

• The annual report and the BRSR. Accurate and consistent, with methods and dates.
• Project pages on your website. Rule 9 requires approved projects to be listed; go further with a short page for each major project: its aim, partner, place, budget, results so far and what you learned.
• Stories written with your partners, in which communities and NGO staff speak for themselves. Ask partners to review drafts before publication. NGOs can read telling your NGO’s story.
• Interviews. A CSR head explaining the thinking behind the programmes, including the trade-offs and the mistakes, is often more convincing than any report.
• Employees and communities. Tell employees what their company’s CSR does, and tell communities what you found and what will change as a result.

If you would like your CSR head’s thinking on the record, The CSR Desk, SocioStory’s series of interviews with CSR heads, may help. Our editors set the questions and edit the interview, your team checks the facts in the draft, and there’s no fee. Interviews and programme stories are published on the site, and the best go out in our weekly mailer to more than 50,000 readers. See SocioStory for CSR teams.

A checklist before you publish

• Every number matches the project register, with its source and date.
• Outcomes are described as outcomes, and outputs as outputs.
• Partners are credited, and have seen the draft.
• Consent is recorded for every identifiable person, and no child is identified where the law forbids it.
• Branding is modest, and nothing reads as an advertisement.
• Environmental claims are specific and backed by evidence.
• What didn’t work is included where it matters.
• The board’s report, Form CSR-2 and the website say the same thing.