Using Visualizations of Negative News to Monitor Your ESG Efforts

Organizations are facing more calls for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) accountability than possibly ever before. Investors want to know that the companies they own stock in are good stewards of the earth and responsible corporate citizens. Likewise, consumers want to know the brands they do business with share the same core principles as they do. And governments and regulatory bodies are now looking to usher in sweeping ESG laws to ensure that companies turn words and promises into action—with new ESG disclosure requirements in many parts of the world establishing transparent reporting.

It's from this heightened focus on ESG by investors, consumers and regulators alike that a new risk landscape has taken shape, one that can lead to reputational and financial risk if not properly navigated. To better understand how your decisions are impacting your company’s ESG initiatives—as well as gain insight into the effectiveness of your competitor’s ESG efforts—your organization needs a way to pinpoint negative news in the media that expose it and others to ESG-related risks.

In this blog, we'll show you exactly how Nexis Diligence+™ makes it easy to screen for negative ESG news so you can maintain your reputation and keep your business thriving. 

How to screen for negative news related to ESG

A dedicated due diligence tool like Nexis Diligence is imperative to stay on top of your adverse media monitoring efforts. Diligence can monitor negative news data about companies, customers, and other third parties that interact with your organization so that you can conduct in-depth, efficient due diligence investigations and be alerted to any number of potential risks, including those related to ESG.

Within these reports, you'll receive visual representations that provide a clear snapshot of where your company--and your partners--is standing with regards to public sentiment. This allows you to better mitigate risks while also strengthening and streamlining regulatory and risk management processes.

MORE: How to deal with negative ESG news coverage

The steps to visualizing negative ESG news for risk assessment

Let’s say you want to better understand a potential third-party supplier’s reputation surrounding ESG issues in the media. You can do so quickly and intuitively using Nexis Diligence in a few simple steps:

Step 1: Conduct the initial search

Select “Company Check” in the main Nexis Diligence screen, and then enter the supplier’s name into the search bar. Nexis Diligence will search content collected from more than 60,000+ sources, including an expansive news archive reaching back more than 40 years.

Because the data is enhanced with metadata, the search results are highly relevant and ready to be explored.

Step 2: Visualize adverse media risk

Once you have your search results, you can then edit and add negative risk terms that are specific to your needs. So to learn what kinds of reputational risks a partnership with this potential supplier may expose your organization to from an ESG standpoint, you can add custom terms like “environment,” “pollution, “green,” or “harassment” to the search string. The results will update accordingly. You can also refine them further using visualizations and other features such as:

Snapshot view: Viewing a “snapshot” of your negative news results will let you see the negative news risk for the potential supplier based on high-, medium- and low-risk terms.

A “doughnut”-shaped visualization captures the proportion of high, medium and low results to give an indication of risk level. You can also see the top and bottom five most common terms. A timeline graph shows the peaks and troughs of how often these terms appeared in news articles over time.

Negative news top 10 terms: Your potential supplier may be so large that it’s covered thousands of times across multiple news sources in a given period and on a certain topic. The “Negative News Top 10” terms in Nexis Diligence surfaces the top 10 terms associated with the supplier in your search results. A dot indicates the level of risk attached to each term—red for high risk, blue for medium and grey for low. For example, terms like “pollution” or “EPA fines” may be among the top 10 terms in your negative news search when investigating ESG risk.

Negative news trends timeline: The timeline in Nexis Diligence+ shows how negative news coverage of your potential supplier changes over time. You can zoom in to see articles that occurred during a spike in adverse news mentions to better understand the context behind fluctuating risk, and you can also narrow down date ranges to gain insight into potential event-related reasons behind spikes or valleys.

Step 3: Report

After you’ve conducted your search, you can automatically create and download reports on your findings to share with team members as well as meet regulatory auditing requirements. You can also download the snapshot view to gain a quick summary of your search results and potential risks.

Step 4: Take action

Now you’re ready to make an informed decision on whether the potential supplier exposes your organization to too much risk regarding ESG factors. Because Nexis Diligence offers targeted risk management, you can capture a comprehensive list of ESG-related adverse news mentions of the supplier or any other critical third party across multiple languages and jurisdictions. Then you can use the visualizations and search filters to bring focus to your findings and leave more time for proactive risk mitigation.

To learn more about how Nexis Diligence can help you visualize negative news and pinpoint ESG-related risks, request a Nexis Diligence+ Trial.