7.1 So you’ve determined your list of material topics, now what?
Managing your topics
As you may have come to realise throughout this course, a materiality assessment achieves so much more than simply determining which topics are relevant to an organisation; it’s also a rich source of information about those topics.
The findings of a materiality assessment should go on to inform data management plans, policies, decisions, strategies and risk management.
7.2 How often to repeat the materiality assessment
Materiality is a dynamic concept; what could be material to an organisation today may not be material tomorrow, and vice versa.
There are three scenarios that could trigger the need for an organisation to reassess its material topics:
- a significant change in the organisation’s business model, activities or corporate structure (for example, a merger or acquisition, or the organisation expands into a new product line); and
- a significant change in an organisation’s external environment (for example, a new regulation, the release of new health-related data, or the emergence of new consumer trends)
- a significant change in the organisation’s value chain (for example, an organisation changes suppliers).
Because materiality is so dynamic and somewhat dependent on changes that could occur outside the organisation’s control, those who integrate materiality monitoring and stakeholder engagement methods in their operations will find they can more efficiently assess materiality when they need to, as opposed to organisations who look at it as an activity they’ll revisit every few years.
