How to define a materiality assessment
The materiality assessment is an analytical tool that facilitates the identification of an organization’s relevant environmental, social and economical aspects that might affect its activities or stakeholders.
Materiality can also be defined as relevance and a materiality assessment enables the understanding of the relationship between the organization interests and the expectations of its stakeholders, highlighting the most relevant topics for both parties.
A materiality assessment helps identify priorities among a variety of relevant sustainability topics, and it provides insights about what needs to be included in a sustainability report according to most of the non-financial reporting frameworks.
How to develop a materiality matrix
The materiality matrix is a graphical representation of the environmental, social and economical aspects of an organization. The diagram reports material topics sorted by the level of relevance for its organization and its stakeholders.
The materiality assessment and the materiality matrix are key processes of the sustainability reporting operations and they are developed according to internationally recognized standards such as GRI or SASB.
Materiality assessment with NUVA
NUVA supports companies that are interested in implementing an effective materiality assessment. Our approach can be integrated with our stakeholder engagement web based tools, bringing together a comprehensive overview of sustainability information about the organization.
Our integrated offer develops over three phases:
- Information: through training and orientation about the topics
- Evaluation: through surveying and analysis activities
- Action: through the design of robust action plan based on the outcomes
We can provide a third dimension, in addition to the conventional double materiality principle, which comes from web content semantic analysis in order to capture the sustainability topics more relevant for the organization based on its online brand perception.A three dimensional materiality matrix provides useful insights to elaborate sectoral, geographical and dimensional benchmarks to better understand the organization performance in context.
