Developing Your Materiality Assessment
Our first step is to conduct an assessment to identify and examine the company’s top three ESG investor scoring industry peers. This helps us to:
A materiality assessment is the compass that ensures sustainability strategies focus on what matters most—both to stakeholders and long-term business value. By prioritizing the most significant impacts, risks, and opportunities, companies can align resources with purpose and resilience.
Louis D. Coppola
Chief Executive Officer & Co-FounderKey Things to Know About A Materiality Assessment
Key participants can include internal leadership teams, employees, investors, customers, suppliers, regulators, and community representatives. Involving diverse perspectives ensures the results are balanced and credible.
It is best practice to refresh the assessment every two or three years. Major shifts in strategy, regulation, or market conditions may warrant more frequent assessments.. This ensures relevance and responsiveness to evolving sustainability issues.
Typical methods include stakeholder surveys, interviews, workshops, peer benchmarking, and data analysis of industry trends. Digital tools and AI are increasingly used to streamline and validate findings.
Many companies prefer to share the results with a materiality matrix, a visual plot showing issues by importance to stakeholders and business impact. Increasingly, heat maps and dashboards are also used for more dynamic communication.
It provides the foundation for determining which topics to disclose in sustainability reports, ensuring alignment with frameworks like GRI, SASB, TCFD, and CSRD. It also supports target-setting and risk management.
Especially for companies at a smaller scale, materiality helps prioritize limited resources, focus ESG initiatives, and build trust with customers and investors.
What's the bottom line?
Our process helps companies focus on the issues that matter most to stakeholders and the business. It strengthens the relevance and credibility of reporting while guiding strategic decisions and long-term value creation.
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