The client issued their inaugural Responsibility and Sustainability Report in 2021. In it, they stressed the importance of quantifying the company’s environmental and social impact as an integral first step towards creating performance benchmarks and making positive, evergreen changes for their business and surrounding communities. When preparing the report however, the client encountered challenges including the manual data collection from multiple sources and risk of leaked information when emailing drafts. While some source systems are used, unstructured data collection is prevalent. They recognized that being at the forefront of climate risk management and corporate responsibility is an ongoing journey that would require the same rigor as financial reporting.
The client chose to partner with the Eliassen Group to help make their ESG reporting process just as meticulous as their SEC reporting process. They evaluated technology solutions that would help alleviate their pain points and selected Workiva. The project involved working with close to a dozen stakeholders’ teams to understand the needs of each party, current processes in place, accounting/reporting considerations, business structure, and other crucial details. With this information, the Eliassen Group built out and streamlined the client’s data collection within the Workiva platform, established framework mapping, and automated their Responsibility and Sustainability Report. The result was one platform for ESG data collection, framework mapping, and ESG Reporting.