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Stakeholders—including investors, companies, regulators, communities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—look to make socially-responsible decisions based on various Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) or sustainability factors:

You can disclose these non-financial factors through reporting, such as within your company's annual report or a standalone sustainability report. The better your company aligns with positive goals, the better stakeholders consider its long-term sustainability. 

Determine material topics and frameworks

Sustainability is not a one-size-fits-all disclosure; rather, the possible disclosures are numerous and vary from industry to industry. To help organizations report these factors, several institutions formed standards for reporting. As you begin to assess which disclosures are relevant—or material—to your company's reporting program, engage with executives, board members, and other stakeholders to:

• Verify their commitment to goals and willingness to dedicate resources to the effort.
• Confirm the company's mission and messaging to support and highlight with disclosures.

Tip: To get started, consider the topics Workiva recommends for any company, regardless of size or industry. To identify which topics matter the most to your stakeholders, start with Workiva's Interactive Materiality Assessment Guide. To map materiality based on your industry and sector, refer to the SASB Materiality Finder or Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) materiality map.

Based on the direction of your stakeholder conversations, decide which frameworks to align with. Some frameworks—like SASB—focus on disclosures based on industry and sector, while others—like TCFD—focus on Environmental factors instead of Social or Governance.

With Workiva's Sustainability Reporting solutions, you can search and browse frameworks to decide which to align with and then identify and bookmark material disclosures from Sustainability Explorer .

Collect and report data

After you determine the frameworks to align with, develop a program to collect data for their material disclosures. When you have the relevant data and values prepared, make them accessible to stakeholders:

• Publish disclosures on your company website and within its annual report or dedicated sustainability report.
• Update current shareholders with your reporting, such as within regular investor outreach.

With Workiva's Sustainability Reporting solutions, you can use Sustainability Program to define your material topics to disclose.

For each topic, you can use metrics to track its values' data collection, reference framework disclosures in Sustainability Explorer, and tag with custom metadata.

To ease data collection for your topics' metrics, Workiva's Sustainability Reporting solutions also include standard spreadsheets to help:

• Define material topics and their related metrics for reporting.
• Curate data for the material topics, and automatically calculate values for reporting.
• Connect values as the source for the Program metrics.

Review and benchmark scores

Rating agencies—such as MSCI and Sustainalytics—research publicly-available information to issue annual reports about companies' performance. If your company is publicly-traded, it has likely been scored by a rating agency, regardless of whether you actively reported disclosures before. We recommend you use these rating agencies' reports to help identify risks or gaps in your program.

After you determine your company's baseline score with a rating agency and start to report aligned to frameworks, benchmark your performance against peers to identify areas for improvement:

• Compare your company's score to that of your peers'.
• Investigate peers' disclosures to understand what they're doing to drive reporting.

Tip: For more guidance on how to get started with sustainability reporting, watch the Rise of ESG Reporting: 5 tips to get started on-demand webinar.