Add and manage stakeholders

According to the ESRS, stakeholder consultation is essential in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of a company's actual and potential impact on people and the environment. It enables the relevance and urgency of sustainability issues to be recognised and highlighted from the perspective of those affected. This process promotes transparency and helps to continuously improve the company's sustainability strategies and goals by ensuring that the voices of stakeholders are heard and taken into account. Stakeholder engagement is not only central to identifying and assessing impacts, but also supports the credibility and acceptance of sustainability reporting. 

Daato offers the option of storing internal and external stakeholder groups as well as individual stakeholders in the tool and assigning them specific sustainability concerns and a corresponding weighting. It is also possible to document which organisation the stakeholders belong to and what relationship they have with the company. All stakeholders and groups entered can then be included in surveys and used to assess sustainability issues and impacts, risks and opportunities.

You can find out more about why stakeholders should be consulted and which stakeholders should be involved here.

How it works:

You can access the ‘Stakeholder Management’ tab in the ‘Double Materiality Materiality Analysis’ section of the ESRS reporting module.

At Daato, stakeholders can be divided into two categories: internal (internal colleagues) and external (external stakeholders such as NGOs, investors, etc.).

Within each category, whether internal or external, the stakeholders are categorised into groups. By clicking on ‘Add’, you can first create a new group (e.g. Climate NGOs) and then create individual stakeholders and assign them to their respective group.

At group level, you can define which sustainability topics are relevant for the stakeholders in the group and should be assessed by them. For example, assign only the areas of environment and governance to the group, or in the area of environment even only the topic of climate change. The stakeholder is then only given the opportunity to add / evaluate these topics or IROs in these areas as part of the surveys.

You can also set the weighting of the stakeholder group's evaluation for your evaluation. This serves to weigh up the opinion of each group. You can therefore assign one group a higher relevance for a certain topic if, for example, their opinion is more relevant because this group has a higher level of expertise and another group a lower one. This is taken into account when we aggregate the individual stakeholder scores into a final score using weighted averages. Please note that you MUST define the relevance of the group for each selected sustainability topic in order to proceed.

To find out more about our valuation model as part of the double materiality analysis, click here.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Can I upload stakeholders?
No, this function does not currently exist.

Do stakeholders need to log in to the system to answer surveys?
Yes.

Can and should I assign individual stakeholders to multiple groups?
No, this is not possible. When creating groups, you should therefore focus on the topics the respective stakeholder or stakeholders in the group should assess, rather than which group within your organization they belong to.

Can I assign topics only to groups, or also to individual stakeholders?
Topics can only be assigned to groups. If you want to assign specific topics to just one stakeholder, you will need to create a group for them.