Four Key Factors Impacting Your ESG Score

Corporate responsibility is playing an increasing role in how the world views your brand or organisation, and the impact of these efforts goes far beyond basic public image or social media plaudits. Your organisation's approach to sustainability can influence everything from how likely consumers are to use your product and which prospective employees are interested in working for you to how attractive you might be to future investors.

Given this growing importance, it’s no wonder that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts are not only essential for sustainable investing, but they’re also quickly becoming a mainstay in running a successful business.

That’s why LexisNexis® created a new, free-to-use Global Media and News ESG tracker. Powered by Nexis Newsdesk™, this tracker allows you to leverage the power of news and media data to understand the ESG story. It offers a unique glimpse into ESG news coverage on specific organisations (including yours!) as well as overall trends in the ESG conversation.

Let’s take a look at a few of the insights you can uncover using the tracker—and how these metrics can impact your brand’s public perception.

Real-time Coverage

Many of the top ESG rating firms factor media coverage into their scores, which means staying on top of your company or brand’s ESG-related coverage is extremely important. The Nexis ESG tracker includes a simple search bar that allows you to access ESG-related news featuring your company—or your competitors—with the click of a button. This information is pulled in real-time from the Newsdesk platform, which taps into nearly 100K news sources from around the globe, written in over 100 languages.

The top 15 stories offered for free via the tracker are just a small sampling of the data Newsdesk has to offer, but they will allow you to see how quickly and efficiently you can measure the impact of your ESG efforts via the full service.

Real-time ESG Trends

Newsdesk’s tracker also allows you to literally see ESG-related trends developing in real-time. The word cloud below highlights how wages & salaries have been a predominant focus for recent stories about executive compensation. Given this trend, it’s likely important for your company or brand’s messaging to include points that address the company’s executive pay structure ASAP—especially if there are any existing disparities to balance.

Newsdesk can also be used to dive deeper into specific ESG topics. The “Top Stories on Equal Pay” section of the tracker highlights this well, identifying the six top stories driving the conversation around the pay gap—a topic at the forefront of most brands’ ESG strategies. Women’s sports have been a major theme in the past month, with three of the top six stories focusing on the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team and the Women’s World Boxing Championships.

Inspiration for Improvement

Newsdesk not only allows you to research which companies are receiving the most favorable ESG-focused coverage but instantaneously visualises the data for quick and easy comprehension. As the chart below shows, major brands such as Bloomberg, Deloitte and Capital One have all shared a significant slice of positive diversity and inclusion coverage in recent weeks.

Understanding which companies are securing positive coverage for their sustainability efforts can be extremely valuable. Positive coverage for other brands—especially if they’re in a similar industry—can inspire potential tactics to deploy within your own organisation, as well as offer best practices for telling the story in the press.

Safer Investments

Attracting new investors and keeping existing ones happy is a huge part of most PR and comms professionals' work. Today, many of those investors want to know that the companies they’re investing in are not only successful but sustainable. As a result, ESG has become an important factor for evaluating the health of companies—with many investment firms assigning companies with ESG scores that allow them to compare potential partners. As we mentioned above, Newsdesk can help with this, allowing you to dive deep into the most-covered ESG-related topics and how specific companies factor into that coverage.