Engaging stakeholders is a critical and challenging step in the DMA process. You aim for perfection, ensuring every question is clear to receive the highest quality responses. Beyond compliance, you want to maximize the value of this engagement. At Karomia, we understand these challenges. Before diving into stakeholder engagement strategies, it's essential to have relevant IROs in place, a topic we covered in our previous blog.

Start Stakeholder Engagement in Days

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Once your IROs are identified and validated, you can begin stakeholder engagement immediately. For example, a recent client validated their IROs within 72 hours of uploading documents and launched data collection within the same week—far faster than the traditional 4 to 6 weeks for IRO identification. Karomia’s software not only identifies all IROs but also generates ideal questions and contexts for your stakeholder engagement, streamlining the process and allowing you to focus on effective engagement.

Manage Stakeholder Engagements Easily

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We understand stakeholder engagement can be daunting. Our platform helps you manage engagements by tailoring questions for specific groups and ensuring the most knowledgeable voices are heard, minimizing false positives or negatives. Different methods, such as surveys and interviews, provide varying insights, and our platform balances these methods for peace of mind.

For instance, a financial institution with a diversified portfolio found that interviewing each portfolio company resulted in a broad and unfocused DMA. Using Karomia, they added focus group workshops with portfolio managers to narrow the scope, focusing on the most impactful and relevant areas.

Extract Valuable Insights from Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder engagement as part of your DMA can enhance communication on sustainable operations and provide strategic insights.

One client in the food industry added personalized videos for each stakeholder group, significantly boosting engagement. They increased their comment ratio to 40%, resulting in 1600 comments out of 4000 responses. Karomia’s software manages this data, extracting relevant insights from all comments mapped on each IRO and stakeholder group.

Another client designed custom topics outside the ESRS framework to extract specific strategic insights, turning mandatory engagement into a strategic opportunity.

Bringing Back Common Sense

Karomia recognizes that sometimes all it takes is common sense to know that some ESRS topics are immaterial. For instance, if you have no production facilities near bodies of water, ESRS E3 is not material. However, selecting IROs in this topic for isolated internal engagements ensures you have an audit trace to prove immateriality. Karomia’s dynamic software platform helps you focus on what matters, saving time on irrelevant topics.

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This is the third article in a four-part series:

In the previous blog, we discussed how we generate IROs from the extracted insights and why this helps you save time and effort in the DMA process.