We first assess a company’s policy commitment to identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for its social impact risk on communities and other stakeholders, based on its disclosures from publicly available information, against the standards for the industry. Policy commitments that may have been formally adopted by the company but which are not easily available to the public fail Big Village Data standard and are therefore disregarded.

Subsequently, we measure implementation: whether the company actually identifies, prevents, mitigates, and accounts for its social impact risk on communities and other stakeholders in practice. The affected stakeholders we look at are local communities, indigenous peoples, workers and supply chain partners.

A large number of variables is used to measure implementation on the six steps of due diligence. Data collection is adapted to the type of business (for example, large footprint with complex supply chain vs mineral extraction) and includes a mix of modular self-administered surveys, using chatbots, targeted field visits, satellite imagery/cartography of land use, resource impact, and community settlements, and relevant third party data and analysis, including news and social media.

The methodology builds on surveys at scale of affected stakeholders through a consistent methodology. This will result in comparable data concerning stakeholder perspectives and, thus, in a credible assessment of the implementation gap.