Respond to CDP for ESG reporting

CDP — formerly Carbon Disclosure Project — is a nonprofit organization that uses responses to its annual questionnaires to score organizations based on their environmental transparency and action. When your company responds to CDP, it can help:

• Identify how to manage its environmental risks and opportunities
• Disclose information about its climate impact to customers and investors
• Provide the market with vital research and insight

Note: If necessary, register your company with CDP to specify your sector and activity classification, and set up who will use CDP's Online Response System (ORS).

When you use Workiva's ESG solution to collect and submit responses to CDP questionnaires, you can:

• Collaborate with other workspace members to collect and compose responses.
• Assign and track tasks to collect values for responses.
• Refer to guidance from CDP and data already collected for your ESG reporting, side-by-side with your questionnaire.

Step 1. Include CDP in ESG Explorer

From ESG Explorer's ESG Admin panel, select which questionnaires to include — Climate change, Forests, or Water security — in Frameworks. 

When you include a CDP questionnaire in ESG Explorer, you can:

• Search and browse its content
• Connect its content to ESG Program metrics

Step 2. Export the questionnaire from CDP

To create the questionnaire, export it from CDP ORS as an Excel file:

1. From the CDP ORS, open the questionnaire, and click Export response, Excel.
   
2. Select to export all pages — including data — and click OK.
   

   Note: When applicable, the Excel file will include responses submitted for previous years' questionnaires in addition to the current year's.

Step 3. Import the questionnaire into Workiva

After you download the Excel file from the CDP ORS, import it from the Create menu or Home to create a spreadsheet based on the questionnaire.

Note: To create a spreadsheet from a questionnaire downloaded from the ORS, use the Import CDP questionnaire option or widget — not an Import Excel (.xlsx) option — to retain logic for CDP.

Note: It may take several minutes to import a CDP questionnaire. Thanks for your patience!

Step 4. Collect your responses

Tip: Only some questions in the questionnaire will apply to your company. To help determine which questions to respond to, refer to CDP's Guidance for Companies.

When you import the Excel file from Home, it creates a spreadsheet based on the questionnaire so you can collect responses.

To help craft a response, select its input cell, and refer to the spreadsheet's CDP Questionnaire panel. For each response, this panel provides:

• Guidance from CDP, including response options, requested content, and scoring criteria
• ESG Program metrics connected to the CDP question

  Tip: To help assign and track responses, set up ESG Program metrics to collect values for CDP questions.

Tip: To send a question's prepared responses to other workspace members for review, select its source section in the spreadsheet's outline, and click Review, Create a review from the Review toolbar. From the History panel, you can also create blacklines to compare revisions from the initial import to the final responses.

Note: When you submit responses to CDP ORS, they appear as plain text — with no bold, italics, or other rich-text styling you might include in the spreadsheet.

Step 5. Submit responses to CDP

When you respond to all applicable questions in the spreadsheet, click Export spreadsheet for CDP from the CDP Questionnaire panel to create an Excel file of the responses.

Note: To create an Excel file of your spreadsheet for CDP, use the CDP Questionnaire panel — not the spreadsheet's Save as Excel — to retain logic for the ORS.

Tip: If you receive a message that responses couldn't export, check all date fields in the spreadsheet to verify they appear in a DD/MM/YYYY format.

After the Excel file downloads, import it into the CDP ORS: 

1. From the CDP ORS, click Import answers, and upload all worksheets of the Excel file.
   
2. Upload any additional attachments or supporting evidence.
3. At the end of the questionnaire, click Submit your response. 

Step 6. Resolve any errors from CDP

If CDP returns errors for your submitted responses, the ORS automatically downloads them as annotations in an Excel file of the questionnaire. To resolve any errors:

1. From the questionnaire's spreadsheet in Workiva, update your responses based on the errors in the Excel file.
2. When all errors are addressed, click Export spreadsheet for CDP from the CDP Questionnaire panel to download the updated responses as a new Excel file.
3. From the CDP ORS, import the new Excel file to submit its updated responses.

Note: For assistance with the CDP ORS or how to respond, refer to the CDP Help Center.

Excel is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.