Choose your own data collection in ESG Program
With Workiva's ESG solution, you can curate values for your Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting from ESG Program. The central hub for your ESG data, ESG Program enables you to organize ESG topics and set up their metrics to collect the values to disclose for those topics. A metric can collect a single value for a collection period, or you can apply a custom dimension — such as Location or Gender — to collect multiple values for different contexts.
To help best meet your reporting needs, you have flexibility when it comes to these values' data collection — even within the same metric!
Through Workiva Tasks
To help ease data collection for a value's assigned workspace members, they can prepare and approve its data through Workiva Tasks. From this streamlined view, members can focus on their task-at-hand and the value in question, without the distraction of extraneous data and noise.
To have a value collected through Workiva Tasks, simply leave Metric value blank. From Metric assignment, set up the value's assignee and approvers, their due dates, and any instructions, and then click Send task.
From a source file
To instead pull a metric's value from a data collection spreadsheet or another Workiva file, set up its assignments, and then click Connect to source file in Value. When you connect a value to a Spreadsheet, select which sheet and cell to pull from; if a Document, which section and content.
When you send the value's data collection tasks, the assigned workspace members can then prepare and approve the value from the source file and mark their tasks as complete from the file's ESG Metrics panel.
For more information, refer to Connect Workiva files to ESG Program metric values in Support Center.
Directly in metric
While you can delegate data collection to other workspace members, you can also collect a value yourself and enter it directly in the metric. Simply select yourself as the Assignee, and enter the value along with any notes or supporting attachments. If the value has an approver assigned, select Send task from its menu to pass the baton to them in Workiva Tasks; otherwise, click Complete value to mark the data collection as Complete.
For more information, refer to Collect values for ESG Program metrics in Support Center.
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Official comment
Hey Andrew, great question! We are currently exploring a couple options that might meet that need, including API endpoints that would enable loading values into ESG Program and programmatically marking them as Complete. In the meantime, though, what you describe is pretty spot-on, where you can currently load and stage values in a Spreadsheet — such as via Chains — and then use it as the connected source file for values in ESG Program.
I will note that if you're a value's assignee, you can mark it as Complete directly from ESG Program without the need to send tasks. It's still a manual operation, but it may be a little easier to manage from the Program — such as part of a manual verification workflow — than through separate tasks.
It would be helpful to know if there are any specific recommended patterns for adding data automatically brought in from source systems. Presumably one would load the data into a source file (likely a spreadsheet) and add connections to the program. Separately, one could either not use task assignments for those metrics (leaving them at "Not started") or specify an assignee to (manually) mark those tasks as "Complete," but is there a vision for how this could be done automatically someday?
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