Workiva Support Center

Sustainability Program acts as the central hub for the data collection and reporting of your company's Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) or sustainability topics.

From Sustainability Program , you can:

• Organize the topics that matter—or are material—to your reporting
• Collect data and values—or metrics—for each topic 
• Automate and track data collection tasks
• Align metrics with framework disclosures and standards in Sustainability Explorer
• Curate files related to your reporting, such as for data collection and materiality assessment

Organize topics and metrics to report

From the Program's outline, you can add the topics and metrics to disclose in your reporting.

• 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.

Tip: To help ease scanning and quickly identify the context of topics, you can apply icons to them in the outline.

Learn more about the outline in Manage outline in Sustainability Program.

Track and automate data collection

After you add a topic to your Program, click it to manage its data collection. From a topic, you can add metrics to curate each value to collect.

For each metric, you can track:

• The content from Sustainability Explorer that it aligns with, such as framework or questionnaire disclosures
• Reference files, such as reporting guidelines or example calculations
• Its value and any related source Spreadsheet or Document
• Any additional details your organization tracks for metrics, as Program tags

To request that team members collect or approve a metric's values, you can set up data collection tasks:

• Assign the data collection and approval to workspace members
• Set due dates for assigned workspace members
• Provide instructions or guidance to help ease accurate data collection 

After you assign a metric value for data collection, click Send task to notify its assignee.

Tip: When the assignee completes their task, the approver — if assigned — automatically receives a task to verify the data.

To manage these data collection tasks, select Tasks from Home .

Learn more about topic metrics in Manage metrics in Sustainability Program and Track data collection of Sustainability Program metrics.

Collaborate with others

Sustainability reporting is a team sport! In addition to delegating requested data collection, a Program Owner can set permissions to ensure workspace members have appropriate access to the Program.