Intro to Connected ESG Reporting

With Connected ESG Reporting, your organization can disclose its impact on—and the impact of—environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics to stakeholders, including investors, employees, and communities. To enable connected ESG reporting, your Workiva solution includes, by default:

• An ESG Framework Items spreadsheet, with primary ESG frameworks' topics and metrics
• An ESG Data Collection spreadsheet, to curate ESG data based on framework topic and year
• An ESG Factbook spreadsheet, to define applicable topics and metrics and calculate values based on collected data

Note: To collect data and update disclosures for ESG reporting, you need Editor or Owner permissions to the ESG Data Collection spreadsheet, ESG Factbook spreadsheet, and their connected Wdata tables.

Step 1. Choose disclosures to report

To help standardize ESG reporting, several organizations provide guidelines—or frameworks—of topics and metrics to report on. The ESG Framework Items spreadsheet contains the topics and metrics from:

• Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)
• Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB)
• Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)
• United Nations Strategic Development Goals (UNSDG)
• CDP, formerly Carbon Disclosure Project

Note: Your ESG Framework Items spreadsheet may also contain additional frameworks or questionnaires your organization uses for ESG reporting.

To identify which of the primary frameworks' topics and metrics to disclose:

1. From ESG Explorer , search and browse the topics and metrics of GRI, SASB, TCFD, and UNSDG all together, and identify related topics across frameworks.

   Tip: As you determine applicable topics and metrics, bookmark them for quick reference, such as to help identify values to disclose as you compose your narrative.

   
   

   Tip: To narrow the focus of the disclosures that appear in ESG Explorer, select which frameworks and industries to include from the ESG Admin panel.

2. In the ESG Factbook spreadsheet, update the Framework indices sheets with the applicable disclosures from each framework.
   

Step 2. Collect values to disclose

After you define the topics and metrics to report on, update the ESG Data Collection spreadsheet with the corresponding values to disclose:

1. To update the ESG Data Collection spreadsheet:
   • Manually enter the data in the applicable sheets
   • Create an incoming connection to a sheet from a source query based on a Wdata table that includes the dataset, such as from a chain or uploaded comma-separated values (CSV) file
   For each value, select its framework topic and year. You can also enter additional details, such as a value's data provider, reviewer, status, or any tags your organization tracks.

   Tip: With tags, you can include standard metadata about a dataset, such as its source or the currency of its transactions. A Workspace Owner can set up the available tags and their values from Wdata Configuration. If necessary, you can also add columns for ESG data collection.

2. To ensure your ESG reporting has the latest values, from the Connections panel, select Outgoing , and click Refresh for the updated sheet's connection.
   

Step 3. Create reporting outputs

To ease ESG reporting, the ESG Factbook spreadsheet's Performance Tables sheets include aggregations and formulas to calculate values for each topic or metric defined in the framework indices based on the collected data. You can link these calculated values to final reporting outputs, such as in:

• Sustainability reports
• CDP questionnaires
• Investor reports
• Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Tip: Your Workiva solution includes an example ESG integrated annual report, as a sample of how collected data can appear for ESG reporting.