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Stakeholder interviews have become an essential tool for companies to improve their sustainability reporting by integrating insights from the actors that are directly affected by or who can influence the company’s activities at different stages. Hence, it’s a critical aspect for a company’s compliance to EU regulations and standards such as the CSRD and the ESRS.
Incorporating these inputs into practice, particularly in the context of double materiality assessments (DMA), helps companies both foresee and manage upcoming material impacts, risks and opportunities. Moreover, it captures the needs, interests, and expectations of stakeholders, building future-proof businesses for long-term value creation and resilience.
This article addresses the best practices linked to incorporating stakeholder insights into double materiality assessments to achieve comprehensive sustainability reporting and compliance. We’ll provide a step-by-step guide on how to identify different types of stakeholders and engage them through stakeholder interviews
The European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) lays down what it means to engage stakeholders, and how to do so. Older frameworks like NFRD focused primarily on environmental or financial disclosures in isolation. This has changed. Now, stakeholder interviews constitute a crucial part of DMAs. Although indirectly related, they contribute to dialogue between companies and stakeholders. This is exactly what is needed to achieve the comprehensive approach behind ESRS. Without these inputs, sustainability assessments are incomplete.
This is how stakeholders engagement is an essential pillar to meet with sustainability reporting standards:
Knowledge on the disclosure requirements highlighted above allow you to effectively engage with your stakeholders for the future interviewing process. These are the 5 levels to follow:
Letting the relevant stakeholders know an input will be required beforehand improves transparency and enables trust within the organization. This foundation is crucial for DMAs and CSRD processes.
In relation to ESRS 2, SBM-2, this involves disclosing:
You can inform your stakeholders about these by sending an email or setting up a meeting.
Once stakeholders are well informed of the activities and projects the company is involved in, consulting is the next sensible step to take. Sustainability managers can reach out to their stakeholders to actively seek inputs. In the context of DMA, the consultation process often involves interviews where stakeholders might share their perspectives on sustainability impacts and risks. These interviews allow for legal compliance under IRO-1, ensuring that DMAs are informed by real stakeholder concerns.
After gathering information from stakeholders, the company might have found that some of the input should be integrated. This is where communication turns two-way. The involvement stage gives stakeholders proactive engagement and the ability to shape the projects that the company is involved in.Interviews and surveys are go-to methods at this stage as well.
Taking it a step further, stakeholder involvement in the projects eventually translates into meaningful collaboration. Decision-making processes take part of this stage, and stakeholders are considered as an integral pillar of the company.
Empowering stakeholders constitutes the final step of their engagement. It materializes into stakeholder-led outcomes. At this stage, stakeholders have achieved the highest degree of authority, dialogue, and proactiveness within the company and its projects. Empowerment allows for a holistic approach to double materiality assessment and ESG integration in CSRD projects.
The stakeholder pool for your company might be too broad; or you just do not know where to start. In that case, the best path to follow is to map your stakeholders. This will allow you to have a clear overview, classify them, and understand how they best contribute to the purposes of your sustainability strategy and DMA processes.
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The first step for stakeholder mapping is understanding who your stakeholders are. Looking back to the ESRS requirements for stakeholder engagement, mapping demands identifying both the nature of the impact (how stakeholders are affected) and the position of the impact (where these stakeholders are positioned within the company).
Regarding the nature of the impact, stakeholders can be classified as direct and indirect:
As for the position of the impact, there is a difference between internal and external stakeholders:
Once different types of stakeholders have been identified, you have to prioritize them. Prioritizing means determining which stakeholders should receive the most attention and resources based on their influence, interest, knowledge, ESG maturity, size, and relationship with the company. A practical way to do this is to score each stakeholder on a scale from 1 to 5 for each criterion, with 1 being the lowest and 5 the highest. The cumulative score helps rank stakeholders, though some exceptions may apply.
Influential stakeholders have the power to shape and control the company’s decisions on specific matters. To evaluate influence, consider:
For instance, regulators typically score high (5) in sustainability contexts due to their legislative power.
Interest illustrates the level of concern of stakeholders in the company’s project. To assess interest, consider:
NGOs often rank high (5) due to their strong advocacy for sustainability.
Some stakeholders might have more expertise than others in DMA and CSRD projects. To evaluate, ask:
Experts like scientists and ESG professionals usually score highest.
Illustrates the development level of stakeholder groups in integrating ESG to their activities and objectives. To assess ESG maturity:
Stakeholders with long-standing reporting frameworks will obtain the highest score.
Stakeholder size is defined by looking at several factors, such as geographic scope or number of employees. Typically:
The strength of your relationship with a stakeholder can influence prioritization. Consider:
Key customers and strategic partners usually score high here.
Your company is now ready to start with stakeholder interviews. Here is a timeline frame to help with the process:
Step 1 - Set the ground for the interviews
Prepare in advance for your interviews with the selected stakeholders. This step is crucial because it would ensure the quality, effectiveness, and potential success of the interviews, and the translation of the obtained insights into your company’s Double Materiality Assessment.
Tip: To effectively prepare for the interview, define the interview goals, questions, and the team to conduct them.
Before starting the interview with your stakeholders, make sure to ask yourself these questions, and communicate them to the interviewees.
Step 2 - Reach out to your stakeholders
Communication is key. When reaching out, be clear about the purpose of the interviews, as well as the context of the project of CSRD and DMA. Stakeholders must know what it is required from them, so that they feel comfortable to share their insights. Transparency enhances trust and ensures active communication and genuine participation from stakeholders.
Tip: Sharing a timeline of the interview process is a valuable move to build this reliance. Think about setting and agenda to align expectations.
Step 3 - Engage with your stakeholders
The next step is to purposely engage with your stakeholders. This is the stage where the actual interviews start taking place. At this level, the steps followed before start to gain meaning. Especially setting up a clear agenda and ensuring transparency and trust. To effectively engage with stakeholders, active listening is crucial to understand their workflow and processes, and how they affect your company’s operations and vice versa.
Tip: Use follow-up questions to develop the idea and paint a detailed picture. This will show your interviewees you are actively involved and listening, improving their engagement.
Now you are ready to start with the interview questions.
For Double Materiality Assessment, distinguishing between types of risk and types of impact is particularly relevant.
Impact questions include:
Risks questions include:
Staying connected with your network of stakeholders is pivotal for CSRD processes. Here is what your company should do to ensure ongoing engagement after stakeholder interviews:
Complying with minimum requirements is as important as preparing stakeholder interviews.
Make sure the following steps are completed to ensure your process meets regulatory and ethical standards:
Confirm that your company aligns with data protection practices. To make sure, handle stakeholder personal data in accordance with GDPR.
Ensure that personal data is securely handled. To ensure appropriate use of privacy and confidentiality, collect, store, and use their information only for the interview and engagement purposes. Send terms and conditions documents to your stakeholders to make sure they review and agree to them.
To follow up with the conversation with your stakeholders and receive feedback, gather email addresses and contact details.
To efficiently engage with stakeholders through interviews, optimize the process so that the insights are captured accurately. Here are four common pitfalls that can undermine your stakeholder engagement process, and what to do instead:
The diversity of your stakeholders pools is highly valuable. Treating feedback too broadly can lead to vague conclusions. In DMAs, detail matters. Instead, seek for segmented feedback for each type of stakeholder, capture specific concerns tied to particular impacts, and use matrices to analyze complex responses.
Stakeholder interviews are likely to be complex. To make sure all the information is stored correctly, record, transcribe, and synthesize the inputs. Using artificial intelligence can be helpful. Keep your notes organized for traceability and audit-readiness.
Interviews should be a genuine opportunity for dialogue and insight, not just a formality. Provide stakeholders with open communication. In practice, make clear how their input will influence decisions and be reflected in disclosures, and be prepared to actively listen and explore stakeholder inputs.
Stakeholder interviews have proven to be more than a compliance exercise. They are critical tools to navigate the complexities of Double Materiality Assessments and EU standards. When done right, stakeholder interviews unlock valuable insights for the company’s operations, allowing them to shape sustainability strategies and build long-standing stakeholder engagement.
If you want to find out how you can seamlessly engage your stakeholders, collect data and generate audit-ready reports all in one platform, reach out to our sustainability solutions team.
Learn how to map, score, and prioritize ESG topics with our step-by-step framework built for SMEs.
Note: This article is based on the original CSRD and ESRS. Following the release of the Omnibus proposal on February 26, some information may no longer be accurate. We are currently reviewing and updating this article to reflect the latest regulatory developments. In the meantime, we recommend reading our Omnibus deep-dive for up-to-date insights on reporting requirements.
Updated on March 24, 2025 - This article reflects the latest EU Omnibus regulatory changes and is accurate as of March 24, 2025. Its content has been reviewed to provide the most up-to-date guidance on ESG reporting in Europe.