The 7 Steps of Conducting a Materiality Survey
Key Takeaways:
- Stronger double materiality assessments emerge when stakeholder surveys are used to validate ESG priorities with real-world input.
- A strategic survey approach helps translate diverse stakeholder perspectives into decision-ready materiality insights.
- Well-analyzed survey data can be transformed into a materiality matrix that directly informs strategy, reporting, and governance.
- Alignment with evolving ESG reporting requirements, including CSRD and ISSB, is reinforced through documented stakeholder input.
- Consistent use of survey insights enables ongoing stakeholder engagement and supports long-term value creation.
Even well-intentioned businesses can benefit from deeper insight into what matters most to their stakeholders. While ESG priorities are often informed by internal expertise, direct stakeholder input helps ensure those priorities are grounded in real-world perspectives.
Incorporating surveys into a double materiality assessment (DMA) is an effective way to gather this input at scale. Surveys enable companies to systematically capture stakeholder views on both financial impacts and broader societal and environmental effects, helping to validate assumptions, identify gaps, and focus on the issues most relevant to decision-making and long-term value creation.
In this guide, we’ll examine what a materiality assessment is, then walk through how to conduct materiality assessment surveys using the following seven steps:
- Identify internal and external stakeholders
- Conduct initial stakeholder outreach
- Identify and prioritize what you want to measure
- Design your materiality survey
- Launch your survey and start collecting insights
- Analyze the insights
- Put insights into action
What Is a Materiality Assessment?
A double materiality assessment is a structured process used to identify and prioritize the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics that are most relevant to a company from two perspectives:
- How sustainability issues affect the company’s financial performance
- How the company’s activities affect society and the environment
The process combines multiple inputs, including internal expertise, risk and opportunity analysis, regulatory and peer research, and direct stakeholder engagement. Together, these elements inform a materiality matrix that visualizes priorities and guides strategy, reporting, and communications. Over time, this approach supports more focused decision-making and clearer, more credible sustainability narratives.
Surveys play a specific role within this process by fostering stakeholder engagement. They provide a scalable, consistent way to capture their perspectives and validate internal assumptions, particularly when assessing impact materiality.
How to Conduct a Materiality Assessment Survey
Understanding how to effectively design and execute materiality assessment surveys is a crucial part of a comprehensive DMA. The following steps outline how to plan, execute, and apply survey insights within the broader materiality process.
1. Identify internal and external stakeholders
Materiality assessments are most effective when they reflect a wide range of perspectives across the value chain.
Begin by identifying relevant stakeholder groups and key contacts within each group who can provide informed input. This typically includes internal stakeholders such as executive leadership, board members, regional managers, and employees, as well as external stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, trade associations, and non-governmental organizations. Including both groups helps ensure a balanced view of priorities and impacts.
2. Conduct initial stakeholder outreach
Once stakeholders have been identified, reach out early to encourage participation and set expectations.
Communicate why their perspective matters, how their input will be used, and how it will inform sustainability strategy and decision-making. Clear, concise outreach helps build trust and improve response rates once the survey is launched.
3. Identify and prioritize what you want to measure
Before designing the survey, determine which ESG topics and indicators stakeholders will evaluate.
These indicators are commonly grouped into economic, social, and environmental categories, such as financial performance, labor practices, human rights, resource use and climate impacts. Use existing internal data, preliminary stakeholder feedback, media and peer analysis, and external frameworks such as GRI, SASB, and CSRD to identify topics most relevant to your business context. This step ensures that the survey focuses on issues that are meaningful and relevant.
4. Design your materiality survey
Surveys should be structured and consistent to produce insights that can be compared, analyzed, and visualized.
A traditional survey format allows stakeholders to rate the importance and impact of each ESG topic using a numerical scale, such as 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. This provides quantitative data that can be aggregated across stakeholder groups. Optional open-text fields allow respondents to add context and qualitative insights that enrich the results.
Once the survey content is finalized, deploy it using a tool that is easy for stakeholders to access and simple for your team to analyze. Common options include dedicated sustainability software or general survey platforms such as SurveyMonkey, Alchemer, or Google Forms.
5. Launch your survey and start collecting insights
Invite stakeholders to participate by sharing the survey link and giving them a clear deadline.
Thank them for their time and explain how their input contributes to the assessment. As the deadline approaches, follow up with reminders to encourage completion. Providing a point of contact for questions can further improve participation and data quality.
6. Analyze the insights
Once responses are collected, review results both collectively and by stakeholder group. Aggregate scores by ESG topic and compare results across internal and external stakeholders, or across roles such as management and employees. Pay close attention to written comments, which often provide valuable context behind numerical rankings.
Use this analysis to identify common priorities, areas of divergence, and topics with high stakeholder significance. These insights can then be visualized in a materiality matrix that supports decision-making and reporting.
7. Put insights into action
Survey results should inform strategy, not conclude the engagement.
Share outcomes with stakeholders through sustainability reports, summaries, or digital channels, and invite ongoing feedback. Use findings to refine sustainability priorities, guide communications, and align initiatives with stakeholder expectations.
By integrating survey insights into broader strategy and reporting efforts, companies can strengthen stakeholder trust and ensure their materiality assessment delivers long-term value.
Aligning Materiality Assessments with Emerging ESG Standards
As sustainability reporting requirements evolve, materiality assessments are expected to clearly show how ESG topics were identified and prioritized. Stakeholder surveys support this expectation by providing structured, documented input that strengthens the double materiality assessment and supports alignment with frameworks such as CSRD and ISSB. When combined with internal analysis and regulatory research, survey results help demonstrate the ways in which stakeholder perspectives informed topic selection and prioritization across both impact and financial dimensions.
Align With Your Stakeholders
Surveys translate stakeholder engagement into actionable insights by capturing perspectives in a consistent and measurable way. When survey results are analyzed alongside internal data, they inform ESG priorities, reporting decisions, and communications. Sharing outcomes with stakeholders and explaining how their input influenced decisions reinforces transparency and supports ongoing engagement.
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