Bringing stakeholders into CSR impact scoring
How I helped Good Steps let CSR consultants score impacts, risks and opportunities together with their stakeholders.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the idea that a business has a responsibility to the society that exists around it.
Since beginning of 2025, Good Steps has been acquired by Sami, the leading decarbonization and environmental reporting platform, and is now integrated into their suite of offerings.
Overview
Good Steps is a SaaS platform used by CSR consultants to run double-materiality assessments under the European CSRD regulation. At the heart of the methodology sit the IRO's — Impacts, Risks and Opportunities — that each company must identify, score and report on.
With the Good Steps team, I led the design of a new module that brings stakeholders into the scoring exercise.
The problem
Until now, consultants scored every IRO alone, from their own expertise. But auditors increasingly ask them to justify each score, and EFRAG's guidance pushes them to consult the stakeholders concerned. Therefore, consultants exported their IROs to Excel, ran a side consultation, then pasted the results back into the platform. Clients like Utopies and Kepler told us this round-trip was a key reason they dropped the tool mid-project.
Running real consultations sounded simple, but came with three constraints:
- a single assessment can hold up to ~150 IROs (you can't send all of them to every stakeholder)
- the scoring criteria must stay aligned with the consultant's own grid (magnitude, scope, irremediability, likelihood)
- the final score must remain the consultant's call. A consultation is one input, not a verdict
What we shaped
Working from the team's pitch, we shaped a tight solution that fit the two-week cycle.
Consultants can now
- Select the IROs that matter and generate a stakeholder consultation in a few clicks, straight from the IRO screen.
- Ask stakeholders to score those IROs through a new "IRO scoring" question type, guided by the same criteria: scale, scope, irremediability, likelihood.
- Let weighted answers roll up into a suggested score, mirroring how materiality scores are already weighted.
- Review everything inside their own grid, with an expandable row revealing stakeholder results per IRO — so the consultant always makes the final call.
This project has challenged me to find solutions for specific problems within a niche, highly regulated business. I had to gain a lot of knowledge of this industry and understand how consultants actually work with their stakeholders.
Outcomes
Select IROs and generate a consultation
From the IRO scoring screen, consultants filter to the issues that matter and launch a tailored consultation — removing the Excel detour entirely.
A single, scannable IRO list
A consolidated list view lets consultants browse IROs by issue before deciding what to put in front of stakeholders.
Scoring that mirrors the consultant's grid
Stakeholders rate impacts, risks and opportunities using the exact criteria consultants use — keeping every input comparable and audit-ready.
Results that feed the analysis
Aggregated, weighted results surface alongside the project's indicators, ready to inform the final materiality and impact scores.
Design for impact
Shipping in a single two-week cycle, the feature closed a gap consultants were leaving the platform to work around.
The user experience improvements played a key role in validating the product and supporting its growth. Beyond the numbers, it gave consultants something they could defend in front of an auditor: impact scores backed by the stakeholders they're meant to represent.
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