Supplier data requests that actually get answered.

The standard advice — send a questionnaire — has a poor response rate everywhere and a worse one here. The failure is almost always in the ask.

5 min read

Published June 2026

Reviewed September 2026

A twelve-page ESG questionnaire arrives at a supplier from a department they have no relationship with, asking about concepts they have never encountered, with no explanation of why or what happens if they ignore it.

It will be forwarded once and then forgotten. That is not a supplier problem.

Four changes that move the response rate

Ask twenty, not two hundredRank by spend and by the emissions intensity of what they supply. Twenty responses covering most of your upstream spend beats two hundred requests returning six.
Ask for specific thingsNot ‘complete our questionnaire’. Instead: how many kilowatt-hours and how many litres did your facility consume last year, and can you attach a bill. A finance manager can answer that in an afternoon.
Attach it to procurementA request arriving with a renewal or purchase order gets answered. The same request sent by the sustainability team in isolation frequently does not.
Explain the consequence honestlyWhere a supplier cannot give real figures, you have to estimate from spend — and that estimate is usually less favourable than their real number. That sentence does more work than any amount of sustainability framing, because it serves their interest rather than yours.

And the ones who still cannot

Most of them, in year one. Use a spend-based estimate, label it as one, and record the basis against each figure so your disclosure can state how much of Scope 3 is supplier-reported and how much is estimated.

That ratio improving year on year is a better story than a flat number, and it is one you can actually tell. What you must not do is silently omit a category because the data was hard — it is the most visible gap in any Scope 3 disclosure and the first thing a reviewer looks for.

Questions

Check this yourself

A summary of a regulation is not the regulation. These are the primary documents this page is based on.

File with confidence, before the deadline files you.

Companies that start now collect a full clean year before they ever have to file. Companies that start late reconstruct one — and that is the expensive part.

Check your deadline

Four questions, and you get the year you first file, the framework, and what to collect first.

Read the requirement

Plain-language explainers of the FRC and SEC rules, ISSB S1 & S2, and what each asks you to disclose.

Compare the cost

What a consultant-led reporting cycle costs against an annual licence, in Naira.