Step 1: Understand your requirements

The enhanced Communication on Progress (CoP) consists of two elements: a CEO statement of continued support and a new standardized CoP questionnaire.

The CEO statement of continued support publicly expresses your company’s ongoing commitment to the Ten Principles of the UN Global Compact at the highest level. The statement is a standardized template that is signed electronically on the new CoP digital platform.

The CoP questionnaire focuses on five disclosure areas (governance, human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption) and is designed to help participating companies monitor performance across the Ten Principles. There will be no scoring or ranking associated with the CoP questionnaire. Rather, the objective is to create transparency and enable progress.

To fulfill the CoP requirement, your company must have electronically signed the CEO statement of continued support and answered all the questions in the CoP questionnaire via the new CoP digital platform by the end of the universal submission period. Check the CoP questionnaire template here and get more information on the CEO statement of ongoing support here.

Step 2: Know your deadlines

Companies should complete and submit their CoP during the universal submission period, which takes place from 1 March through 30 June annually, in order to maintain ‘active’ status in the UN Global Compact.

If a company fails to complete and submit their CoP during the universal submission period, they will fall into ‘non-communicating’ status, and their name and status will be publicly displayed here. This status can be reverted to ‘active’ by submitting the CoP any time between 1 July and 31 December, annually.

If a ‘non-communicating’ company fails to submit their CoP by 31 December, they will be delisted from the UN Global Compact for ‘failure to communicate’ in January of the following calendar year. Delisted companies will be publicly displayed here.

With the new CoP, there will be no grace periods or extensions.

For more details on the CoP requirements, delisting and rejoining policy, access the CoP policy.

Step 3: Prepare your report

1. Confirm your CEO’s continued support to the UN Global and the renewal of the company's ongoing commitment to the initiative and its principles.
2. Review the CoP questionnaire to understand the questions asked and the data that will be collected. You can access the CoP questionnaire template here.
3. Use the CoP Guidebook here to get information on how to answer the questions, find calculations and explore a glossary of key terms to help you complete the CoP questionnaire.
4. Begin your data collection process on time! You can use the spreadsheet here to support your data collection process with relevant team members and the CoP Data Compilation Checklist here (see p. 74).
5. Check that you have access to the UN Global Compact dashboard here. Refer to the user's guide to learn how to request credentials. The CoP digital platform will open on 1 March annually for companies to start completing their CoP requirements directly on the platform.

Step 4: Complete and submit your CoP

Once you have…

• ✓    Answered all questions in the CoP questionnaire
• ✓    Electronically signed the CEO statement of continued support
• ✓    Uploaded relevant supplemental documentation (e.g. policies, sustainability report, etc) that you would like to VOLUNTARILY add to complement your submission
• ✓    Made a last review of the information provided

… you are ready to submit your CoP through the digital platform.

Step 5: Visualize your submitted CoP report

Upon submission of the CoP, all companies will be able to view their completed CoP report on their participant profile on the UN Global Compact website, where it will be accessible by any stakeholder and the public as an html web page and downloadable as a PDF.

Companies will also be able to visualize their CoP answers, track and understand performance and benchmark against peers through their data visualization dashboard on the CoP digital platform.

Please note that all data, including supplemental documentation that was submitted by a participating company through the CoP digital platform, will be made publicly available on the UN Global Compact website. This data may be used by the UN Global Compact in aggregate form to present trends or included in reports about the status of corporate sustainability. The UN Global Compact does not have any responsibility on the accuracy of the data submitted by its participating companies nor on how this public data will be used by other stakeholders.