Community-First ESG: Datamaran’s Collective Impact Series

At the heart of Datamaran’s approach is a deliberate shift in language. Many standards bodies, Marjella suggests, become stuck at the level of key performance indicators, debating how best to measure a specific metric.

Business leaders, however, want to understand the underlying drivers: why a topic matters, where it is emerging and how it affects fundamentals like revenue, costs or resilience. To bridge this gap, Datamaran built what she describes as a dictionary or ontology – a structured map – of sustainability topics.

Initially focused on environmental, social and governance issues, it has expanded to include geopolitical, cyber and technology trends that shape corporate risk. The platform continuously scans mainstream business sources, such as regulations, media coverage, reputational signals and peer disclosures to track how these issues evolve.

“From the start, we broke sustainability down into business risks and opportunities, and created a single source of truth internally,” Marjella says.

This enables sustainability, risk, legal and other functions to work from the same taxonomy and evidence base. Crucially, not all issues are created equal for every company. Datamaran uses a client’s footprint – sectors, geographies, upstream and downstream relationships – to pinpoint which topics are most likely to be material.

“We help companies understand what is most applicable to them and then track those issues by country or sector over time,” she explains.

The result is a topic‑level view grounded in core business concepts. Marjella insists this framing is essential to overcome confusion and resistance.

“We talk about risk and opportunity rather than ‘sustainability’ – that’s the language business leaders understand,” she says.