Five steps to develop a sustainability strategy: Step three

We've covered education in part one, and stakeholder mapping in part two.

Materiality assessment

The following step is a materiality assessment. This assesses which key issues, previously identified in step one, are the most important and impactful to a company.

A materiality assessment helps identify which issues are the most important to the business and its stakeholders. Here, the easiest way to undertake this assessment is to conduct a survey, one internally and one each by your major stakeholders, which asks them to rank the identified sustainability issues by importance and impact.

To make this easy to analyse, you can use the materiality assessment tool on digitalrg.com or survey stakeholders online. Once all this information has been collected, it will need to be analysed to show the key issues where the sustainability assessment should focus.

There are multiple ways that this can be done. One is by plotting the indicators gathered from the surveys on a materiality matrix (see simplified example above).

Identifying these issues can also be done through internal and external conversations which will give more qualitative information. Though here key issues which the sustainability strategy should focus on are highlighted, the others should not be ignored and still require some level of attention.

In part four tomorrow, we'll look at how steps one, two and three come together to help you build an ESG action plan.

Participate in ICE365 and DigitalRG's industry ESG survey

In order to understand the key issues on which the industry needs to focus, click here to do a personalised materiality assessment. This will be used as part of the ICE365 Materiality Matrix, in collaboration with DigitalRG, to create the most accurate picture of the ESG elements the gambling industry will prioritise in the year ahead.