If anything, the flood of corporate announcements surrounding the 40th anniversary of Earth Day showed that trumpeting environmental initiatives has become big business.

While organizations everywhere took advantage of Earth Day to improve their brand image, the media seems to have taken a more cynical view. Forty years of work and we saw just as much coverage devoted to the issue of "greenwashing" as to highlighting the progress that so many businesses continue to make.

So why do so many organizations miss the mark when it comes to communicating their achievements?

The obvious answer is that as more and more companies wrap their marketing in green messages, it gets harder and harder to separate the wheat from the chaff. But if spin is the enemy, then the best antidote is to offer something of value.

When we provide something that is useful to others we earn the right to tell our story. The best sales and marketing people know this principle and it also holds true for corporate sustainability reporting. Why would anyone want to read a corporate sustainability report if it didn’t somehow benefit them? There has to be something they can learn or gain.

Corporate sustainability initiatives should be embracing a new spirit of collaboration. We should be looking to share our knowledge and experiences, even if what we’re putting out there has taken time and money to create.

Parting with our intellectual property -- including ideas that help others help the environment -- is considered blasphemy for most corporations. But if we aren’t sharing knowledge to promote sustainability, especially when it won’t make or break our business, then how serious can we be?

If we are going to reverse the damage we’ve done to the environment, we have to enable others to do their part wherever we can. Doing this increases our own impact exponentially. It can also accelerate the pace of innovation by allowing others to use, alter and build upon our ideas.

We’ve seen a number of inspiring examples of this in recent times. The sole purpose of the GreenXchange and the EcoPatent Commons is to share intellectual property in hopes of being catalysts for change. Beyond the greater good, these initiatives are helping to recast companies like Walmart and Nike as thought leaders in the sustainability movement.

Now most of us are not operating on the same scale as the Fortune 500. And many of the businesses we represent may not even do R&D. But we can still learn a thing or two from their example -- especially when it comes to reporting our progress.

The experience of identifying what we’ve done for the purpose of helping others can be illuminating. Those of us who have embarked on the journey have a lot more to offer than we might imagine, even if it isn’t necessarily patent-worthy. Templates, data collection tools and questionnaires often have a limited lifespan because they are tied to projects that have already been completed. Instead of letting them collect dust, give them a second life by sharing them with the world.

Rather than just using corporate sustainability reporting to promote our efforts, we can engage our audience by using it as a vehicle to share tools and, more importantly, our learning. The insights and mistakes we make along the way can be a great source of inspiration. And by making the act of sharing a part of how we communicate, we become more transparent about what we have and expect to accomplish.

Enabling others is about more than separating the serious-minded from the rest. It can be profoundly liberating. By putting it all out there, we force ourselves to be more honest and straightforward. And for all those people who’ve stopped reading corporate sustainability reports, this can be especially refreshing.

Melissa Alvares is the Sustainability Programs manager at Softchoice, whose most recent corporate sustainability report was designed to share all the firm’s insights, tools and templates. Melissa welcomes feedback at twitter.com/greenITgirl  or the LinkedIn group Corporate Sustainability Leaders.

Image by sxc user mmagalian.