NEW YORK—Hill+Knowlton Strategies has launched a new offering that will advise companies on how to use sustainability efforts to improve their financial performance through integrated reporting, a comprehensive method for reporting value, performance and impact. The firm will partner with Harvard Business School professor Robert Eccles (pictured) and his firm Glenelg Partners to support the new offering.

H+K Strategies will help companies provide integrated reporting of their financial and environmental, social and governance performance in a single document. The firm will assist at each stage of the process, from understanding how to consider nonfinancial information in a financial context to publishing an integrated report.

Research by Eccles has found that high-sustainability companies—those with a long, consistent track record of engaging in and disclosing efforts to operate with economic, social and governance policies in mind—significantly outperform their counterparts over the long-term, both in terms of financial performance and rate of return for investors.

“Investors find less risk in more transparent companies because there is less uncertainty about their ability to deliver expected financial performance,” says Eccles.

The service will be led by Robert Ludke, senior vice president in Hill+Knowlton Strategies’ Washington, DC, office, with counsel from Professor Eccles.

According to Ludke, “What we’ve heard from investors, corporate sustainability experts and many of our clients is that there is a need for the next generation of corporate reporting, in which financial and nonfinancial information are integrated.”