Why B Corp’s 2025 Standards Make Materiality a Strategic Imperative
With the release of the B Corp 2025 Standards, materiality has moved from a “nice to have” to a formal requirement for many certifying companies. This evolution reflects a broader shift in the sustainability landscape: understanding your most significant impacts is no longer reserved for large, listed organisations navigating CSRD or SEC rules.
For B Corps, materiality is about sharpening focus — identifying where a business can do the most good, mitigate harm, and set credible, measurable targets that support long-term value creation. While B Lab allows flexibility in methodology and does not mandate double materiality, aligning your assessment with global best practice makes the process more robust, defensible, and future-ready.
Below are five practical steps B Corps can follow to complete a double materiality assessment (DMA) that meets B Corp expectations while setting the organisation up for stronger strategy and impact management.
Step 1: Define Scope, Boundaries, and Purpose
The first step is clarity. Before diving into data or stakeholder surveys, organisations should define:
- Organisational scope (entities, geographies, subsidiaries)
- Value chain boundaries (upstream suppliers, downstream customers, use of products)
- Purpose of the assessment (B Corp certification, strategy, risk management, target-setting)
For B Corps, this step is critical because the Standards require companies to identify significant impacts not already addressed by the B Lab Standards. A well-defined scope ensures those gaps can be clearly identified and justified.
Many organisations choose to align their scope with recognised frameworks like GRI, CSRD/ESRS, or UN SDGs, even if they are not legally required to report under them. This alignment improves consistency and credibility — especially for B Corps operating globally or planning to scale.
Step 2: Identify a Long List of Sustainability Topics
Next, companies should build a comprehensive list of potential ESG topics relevant to their operations and value chain. This “long list” should reflect:
- Environmental impacts (e.g. climate, water, biodiversity)
- Social impacts (e.g. labour practices, DEI, community impacts)
- Governance topics (e.g. ethics, data privacy, responsible sourcing)
While B Corp focuses primarily on impact materiality, incorporating financial risk and opportunity considerations (double materiality) provides a more complete view of how sustainability issues affect both society and the business itself.
Using a structured topic library aligned to international standards helps ensure nothing material is overlooked — and avoids the perception that topics were selected arbitrarily to support a desired outcome.
Step 3: Engage Stakeholders Meaningfully
Stakeholder engagement is a cornerstone of the B Corp Standards — and one of the most valuable parts of a materiality assessment when done well.
B Corps are expected to engage beyond internal leadership, incorporating perspectives from:
- Employees
- Customers
- Suppliers
- Local communities
- Other affected or vulnerable groups
Effective engagement balances quantitative input (surveys, scoring) with qualitative insight (interviews, workshops). This is especially important for identifying social and value-chain impacts that may not be visible from internal data alone.
A structured DMA approach allows organisations to document who was engaged, how feedback was gathered, and how it influenced the final results — a key expectation under the 2025 Standards.
Step 4: Assess, Score, and Prioritise Impacts
Once topics and stakeholder inputs are collected, companies assess and prioritise issues based on defined criteria.
For impact materiality, this typically includes:
- Severity and scale of impact
- Likelihood of occurrence
- Ability to influence or mitigate the impact
For financial materiality (where applied), criteria may include:
- Revenue, cost, or asset exposure
- Regulatory and reputational risk
- Strategic opportunity
The outcome is a clear, defensible prioritisation of the most significant sustainability issues — often visualised through a materiality matrix. For B Corps, this step is essential in identifying which material topics are not already addressed by the B Lab Standards and therefore require additional targets and actions.
Step 5: Translate Results Into Targets and Action
Materiality only delivers value if it informs decision-making. B Corp’s 2025 Standards explicitly require companies to set targets for their most significant unaddressed impacts, ensuring the assessment leads to real operational change.
This step includes:
- Validating results internally
- Linking material topics to strategy and governance
- Setting measurable targets, timelines, and ownership
- Establishing a process for regular review and updates
A structured DMA approach also makes it easier to reuse results across reporting needs — whether for B Corp recertification, voluntary sustainability reporting, or future regulatory requirements.
Why a Structured DMA Approach Matters for B Corps
Materiality is about focus. For purpose-driven businesses with limited resources, knowing where to invest time, money, and effort is critical.
By aligning B Corp materiality requirements with double materiality best practice, companies gain:
- Stronger strategic insight
- More credible target-setting
- Easier alignment with CSRD, GRI, and investor expectations
- A future-proof foundation as sustainability standards continue to converge
Tools designed specifically for double materiality assessments, such as Socialsuite’s DMA software, can significantly reduce the administrative burden — providing structured topic libraries, stakeholder engagement workflows, scoring methodologies, and audit-ready documentation in one place.
Looking Ahead
B Corp’s embrace of materiality in the 2025 Standards is a meaningful step forward. As expectations around transparency and accountability continue to rise, B Corps that invest in robust, repeatable materiality processes will be best positioned to demonstrate real impact — not just intent.
