Supplier survey fatigue: how to make the emissions ask smaller

Supplier survey fatigue sets in when every customer sends a different blank questionnaire to the same one or two people. Response rates rise when the ask gets smaller. This post covers what a smaller ask looks like, how suppliers can answer once for every customer, and the support that helps a supplier measuring for the first time.

What is supplier survey fatigue?

Supplier survey fatigue is the drop in response rates and answer quality that follows when suppliers receive more emissions questionnaires than they can answer well. It is a design problem. Each questionnaire is reasonable on its own, but suppliers receive many of them at once.

Most large organisations sit on both sides of it. The procurement team sends requests to suppliers while the sustainability team answers requests from its own customers and investors. So the fix has to work for the team asking for data and for the team being asked.

Why do long questionnaires get fewer answers?

Long questionnaires get fewer answers because each one starts blank, comes in a different format and competes with every other customer's request for the same small team. Some disclosure routes also charge the supplier to respond. At many suppliers, sustainability is handled alongside another job.

Security teams know the pattern well. In vendor security reviews, vendors answer 23 assessment requests a month on average, at about 3.5 hours each, according to Whistic's State of Vendor Security 2022 (surveys of 315 InfoSec and 303 sales respondents, December 2021). A supplier sustainability team is often one or two people, so the same arithmetic bites sooner.

The size of the ask is what changes the outcome. Prepopulated requests get higher response rates than a cold survey. DitchCarbon gets excellent response rates from traditional manufacturing locations because what arrives is a short request built on what the supplier has already disclosed.

What does a smaller emissions ask look like?

A smaller ask starts from what the supplier has already published and asks only for what you need for a specific purpose. The supplier sees its own data already in place and adds detail, so it isn't rebuilding its footprint for each customer.

In practice, that means three changes to the usual questionnaire:

• Start with what exists. The supplier's published GHG inventory, product footprints and targets are already in the request, so nothing it has disclosed is asked for twice.
• Ask for a purpose. To reduce emissions, you might need the electricity consumption and renewable share of the facility that serves you. To report accurately, you might need the activity data behind what you buy, or a product carbon footprint for a named item.
• Ask the suppliers where it changes the result. Requests go first to the organisations carrying the most embodied emissions, and the same method then extends to 100 suppliers or to 10,000.

Any model that has to ask every supplier before it knows anything adds to the queue, whoever is running it. Coherent covered 15,000 suppliers without a survey programme. Where requests do go out, the results hold up at scale: a recent deployment gained additional primary data from 30% of over 40,000 recipients.

How can a supplier answer once for every customer?

A supplier can answer once by keeping its emissions data on a single profile that every customer reads. On DitchCarbon, claiming a profile is free, and the supplier lands on the same page its customers see.

The profile draws on the same verified emissions data for over 2 million organisations, built on primary emissions data wherever it exists, so what the supplier has already published is what its customers see first. From there it can:

• answer a question once, in context, and choose which customers can read the answer
• upload the reports and source documents customers ask for
• add energy data, activity data, product carbon footprints or a decarbonisation plan
• forward any other customer's questionnaire to the survey responder, where it joins a tracked queue answered from profile data

Sharing is always the supplier's decision. Generic product and activity data it agrees to share is available to the next customer that asks. A disclosure made privately for one customer stays with that customer. Suppliers can claim their profile to start.

What support helps suppliers who are new to emissions data?

Suppliers measuring for the first time respond best to plain guidance, matched to where they are and what their customer has asked for. A short request with a link to the right help gets further than a long questionnaire with a glossary attached.

DitchCarbon's Supplier Support section is built for that supplier, and it is free to use whoever the customer is. Its guides follow five stages, Respond, Measure, Commit, Reduce and Lead, so a supplier can start with the request in front of it and come back as its programme grows. Alongside the guides:

• Supplier Sessions, a free webinar series held every other Tuesday at 14:00 UK time, each covering one stage
• The PCF Evaluator, which grades a product carbon footprint before a supplier sends it, so the supplier knows whether it can enter a customer's calculation
• ClimateMate, DitchCarbon's free decarbonisation plan builder
• SME Climate Hub, a free starting point for a first company footprint, with free local resources by country listed in Supplier Support

DitchCarbon builds that support into the request itself. Each request starts from what the supplier has already disclosed, asks only for what the customer needs, and points the supplier to help at the stage it has reached. The result is more primary data for the buyer and less work for the supplier.