Full Service ESG Action Plans

For companies committed to “walking the talk” on corporate sustainability commitments. We engage your team in a collaborative process to build consensus, set goals, and execute with confidence.

Full Service ESG Action Plans

A customized action plan designed for industry-leading ESG and sustainability programs.

What is a Full Service Sustainability and ESG Action Plan?

ESG reporting is how investors and other stakeholders hear about your corporate sustainability performance. But ESG is not designed to be an effective framework for strategic planning, or achieving continuous improvement in corporate sustainability performance. From safety to energy and emissions, “walking the talk” takes an effective strategy, distributed accountability, clear goals and metrics. Embedding sustainability in your organization’s culture and operating practices is a major challenge, but it doesn’t have to be.

Our Full Service Sustainability and ESG Action Plans are:

  • Data-driven. We apply benchmarking, materiality assessment, and stakeholder mapping.

  • Collaborative. Facilitating input from company leaders to ignite interest and create alignment.
  • Goal-oriented. We apply best practices in change management theory and continuous improvement to help teams with short-term goals that support longer-term ambitions.

  • Comprehensive. Companies need a programmatic approach to meet buyer and investor expectations in today’s ESG and sustainability surveys, benchmarks and risk assessment systems.

  • Growth-positive. We work with you to create strategic communications that support brand differentiation, employee retention, and ladder up to your corporate mission & purpose.

How Third Partners Builds Full Service ESG Action Plans

An ESG and sustainability action plan is a dynamic, customized, living set of program materials to connect individual sustainability initiatives into a unified program and message. Consulting deliverables are tailored around your current approach and objectives. Deliverables include collaborative workshops with managers, new policies and workflows, KPI and metrics scorecards, sustainability communications plans, and more.

Tailored to Your Organization’s Mission & Goals

A phased implementation plan that aligns with your brand, market, culture, and management structure.

Consensus Based

Grounded in the work from our Internal Alignment and Governance steps, so you don’t have to create consensus where it already exists.

Comprehensive Service From the Start

Combines the best of external case studies, internal ambition, and stakeholder concerns into a plan that works for you and delivers comprehensive reporting.

Defines Roles to Instill Accountability

Provides distinct key performance indicators (KPIs) with an ownership and accountability plan so everyone knows who, what, where, when, how, and why.

Our Approach to ESG Strategy Consulting & Advisory Services

Our ESG & Sustainability action plan results in a process with clear and actionable steps. This comprehensive roadmap helps companies better articulate their sustainability program, measure performance, and earn recognition in a variety of common ESG reporting channels.

1. Comprehensive and systematic process from design to implementation

Prioritize a comprehensive, systematic, and progressive approach to ESG implementation.

2. Industry-leading insight backed by proven data

Incorporate insights from benchmarking, materiality, and the governance advisory.

3. We provide a customized roadmap aligned with your organization’s goals

Provide a customized roadmap with clear action steps and consistent goals for managers to follow and track over time.

4. Our goals based process is implemented in your organization’s timeline

Collaboratively create clear action steps and goals based on short, medium, and long-term priorities.

We Train Leaders and Equip Teams to Develop Action Plans

Though we typically deliver Action Plans as part of a deeper, strategic scope of work, we also conduct trainings to empower executives and managers to build their own action plans. Third Partners Academy is our accelerated sustainability training and professional development service line, and in the “Strategy to Action Plan” course, we provide you with our workbook and standardized processes for setting priorities, identifying valuable internal resources, and taking action.

Learn more about Third Partners Academy

We Train Leaders and Equip Teams to Develop Full Service ESG Action Plans

Though we typically deliver Action Plans as part of a deeper, strategic scope of work, we also conduct trainings to empower executives and managers to build their own action plans. Third Partners Academy is our accelerated sustainability training and professional development service line, and in the “Strategy to Action Plan” course, we provide you with our workbook and standardized processes for setting priorities, identifying valuable internal resources, and taking action.

ESG Strategy Consulting & Action Plan Case Study: Profile Products

Profile Products, a leading developer and manufacturer of highly engineered specialty agriscience materials, came to Third Partners to establish a formal ESG program beyond its product-related sustainability initiatives. Our team first performed a benchmarking assessment with five peers and competitors to give Profile Products a confident measurement of where they stood within their industry. We then conducted stakeholder interviews with corporate leaders and key customers to establish Profile Products’ ESG priorities as part of their first materiality assessment. Third Partners used the outcomes to develop the structure and branding for Profile Products’ ESG program; produce an ESG roadmap and action plan with phased recommendations; and facilitate strategic working groups and trainings to align leaders across the business on high priority issues.

Full Service ESG Action Plans FAQs

When some or all of the following conditions are present, companies will benefit from hiring a growth-oriented sustainability consulting firm like Third Partners to build a sustainability action plan:

  1. Need to create internal alignment and consensus on ESG issues by facilitating strategic planning conversations across business units and departments.
  2. Past experiences of confusion, slow progress, or false starts with sustainability planning, including feeling “stretched” by competing disclosure requirements or lack of resources.
  3. The company’s culture is performance-oriented and would benefit from an evidence-based, multi-year strategic roadmap to take existing sustainability initiatives from “good to great.”
  4. Competitive benchmarking would be valuable to gain industry-specific insights into how peers and competitors are creating value from sustainability initiatives.
  5. Customers or investors are asking for a “Materiality Assessment,” a specific kind of sustainability and ESG prioritization tool that is often facilitated by an outside firm.
  6. There are too many ad hoc project management approaches e.g. managing everything in Excel, and the company would benefit from a more disciplined approach to sustainability planning.
  7. Avoid the cost of adding a new sustainability-related headcount by creating a plan that matrixes sustainability management across various existing roles.

Third Partners specializes in growth-positive sustainability strategies for companies. We work with companies at all different stages of maturity. If you don’t already know where you stand on sustainability or ESG performance relative to peers and competitors, we can help you benchmark your performance. A key advantage of our approach is customization. We take the time to get to know your managers, competitive environment and find solutions that create incremental business value.

The first step is to create an ad hoc steering team consisting of internal stakeholders who can provide input and who will benefit from participating in the process. Importantly, the project team can consist of a mix of roles, seniority levels, and departments that work together to develop recommendations which go to the C-Suite and Board. Action plans that are company-wide in scope take, on average, six months to plan, create, and socialize. If action plans are specific to a particular issue, for example a corporate carbon emissions reduction or goal-setting program, the timeline can be condensed into a number of weeks or months using Third Partners’ agile planning process.

Contact Third Partners to develop a customized action plan to build a world class sustainability and ESG program.

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Additional Advisory Services

Materiality Assessment

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Internal Alignment

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Competitive Benchmarking

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Governance

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