White Paper: Adding the Social Angle the Social Angle to Portfolio Assessment

The Handbook provides a pragmatic step by step guidance to explore and apply the social metrics in your first case studies. It contains plenty of guidance in the data collection, hotspot identification, circular economy and impact assessment.

The Social Topic Report is the companion of the Handbook. It provides the definitions of 25 social topics, the reference scales and performance indicators. It is updated in April 2022; with more links to relevant standards and clarifications and examples.

Our Core Partners are implementing the social metrics in their organisations supported by efficient procedures. The Implementation Guide shows how this can be done, based on the journeys our Core Partners are making currently.

The Methodology is based on the recognition that companies can not only impact social wellbeing, but are also dependent on it. The social topics are selected based on this understanding of mutual dependency between an organisation, its workers, the local communities, the small-scale entrepreneurs and of course their customers.

Proactive companies are aligning their strategy with what they expect to be the future societal needs and market trends. It is increasingly clear such needs and market trends will be highly influenced by the transition towards a sustainable society. The internationally agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a clear source of inspiration as it makes clear what the world is targeting by 2030. More recent trends confirming this, are developments like Green Deals, the Due Diligence legislation, Taxonomy, and the trend towards Integrated Reporting addressing the needs of the financial communities.
An important tool to prepare for this future world is Portfolio Assessment, which aims to understand which parts of the portfolio are challenged by these developments and which can be understood as a winner in the future. Portfolio Assessment often focusses only on the environmental and economic capitals, while the SDGs and other sustainability frameworks also explicitly address the social and human capitals. In this white paper we show how two proactive partners of the Social Value Initiative1 use the PSIA Handbook2 to consistently add also the social and human capital perspective.
The purpose of this white paper is to inspire companies that want to add the social angle to their portfolio management. The white paper is based on the collaborative effort of two proactive members of our initiative: DSM and Corbion who, together with PRé developed this whitepaper during 2021 and 2022

The Whitepaper captures the inputs and discussions between Alexandra Florea from DSM and Ana Morao from Corbion and focusses on three questions:

• Strategy and Policy: How to embed a purpose driven strategy with clear objectives
• Methodology: How to efficiently and effectively assess impacts
• Process: How to embed these procedures in the organization

DSM and Corbion developed consistent procedures to include social assessments in their procedures, both are using the Handbook as the key reference. The PSIA Handbook provides the basis for defining the relevant and material social topics and procedures to understand both the value chain impacts and especially the impact on the users. While discussing the different approaches of the companies, we found that there are a number of choices that are interesting as an input to further discussions and development.

The Whitepaper can be downloaded here

The May 11th webinar recording where we presented both the whitepaper on Reporting and Portfolio Assessment can be found here If you just want to review the slides, please click here

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