Workiva Support Center

To help ease the data collection for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) or sustainability reporting, create a Sustainability Program.

Sustainability Program acts as the central hub for your sustainability reporting, where you can curate:

• Files related to your reporting and data collection
• Topics that matter—or are material—to your reporting
• Sustainability Explorer content that aligns with data collection
• Data and values—or metrics—collected in source Spreadsheets for each topic

Step 1. Create a Sustainability Program

Tip: First things first! Before you create a Program, know what topics to include. If you haven't yet, assess the materiality of topics, and set up the frameworks you align with in Sustainability Explorer.

1. From Sustainability Program , select Program overview in the outline, then select Create program from the menu.
   
2. Enter a unique name to identify the new Program.
   
3. Under Program files, add any files in the workspace related to the Program and its topics, such as:
   • Spreadsheets with source data or values that support the topics' metrics
   • Documents used to identify the Program's topics, such as materiality assessment or competitive research
   • Presentations, such as previous years' reports
4. To restrict access to the Program, click Permissions , and select appropriate permissions for collaborators and groups.

Step 2. Set up the outline

Sustainability Program organizes the metrics values you disclose in reporting based on their topics:

• Topics — which appear in bold in the outline — indicate the specific factors that the Program addresses and can categorize those factors by theme. For example, an Environmental topic may include more granular topics such as Energy and Waste, while a Social topic may include topics like Diversity & inclusion (D&I) and Human rights.
• Metrics enable data collection of values for each topic. For example, a Scope 1 emissions topic may have metrics to collect values to disclose for Stationary combustion, Mobile combustion, and Refrigerants.

Note: You can't rename or remove the default Program overview item in the outline.

To set up the hierarchy of the Program, add topics and their related metrics to the outline, and arrange them as necessary.

Tip: To ease scanning and help identify context, apply icons to topics and metrics in the outline.

When you add a metric, you can:

• Include context around its intent — such as related Explorer content, reference attachments, and any custom tags — to meet your reporting needs.
• Apply a custom dimension — such as location or demographic — to enable multiple values, and set up the frequency of their data collection.
• Assign workspace members to prepare and approve values.
• Select to collect its values directly through the Program, a connected source file, or the streamlined Workiva Tasks.

Step 3. Send tasks to metric assignments

After you set up a topic's metrics, click Send tasks to begin their data collection. When you send the tasks, the assigned workspace members receive a notification to collect their values. You can manage your tasks from Home .

For more information, see Track data collection of ESG Program metrics.