- Having significant current or potential impact on the Company
- Of significant concern to stakeholders
- Over which Ford has a reasonable degree of control
Our intention is to cover the most material issues in the print report. Our full report on the Web covers additional issues, including elements and indicators identified by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).
To identify and prioritize material issues, we followed a three-step process.
Identification of material business issues
We developed a list of more than 500 issues, grouped into 15 topics, by reviewing Ford business documents as well as comments from employees, dealers and our major external stakeholders: customers, communities, suppliers, investors and NGOs. The documents included Ford policies and business strategy inputs, the Global Reporting Initiative G3 Guidelines, summaries of stakeholder engagement sessions, and reports from socially responsible and mainstream investors.
Prioritization of the issues
We noted the frequency with which issues were raised in the source documents and rated each issue as low, moderate or high for (1) current or potential impact on the Company in a three- to five-year timeframe, (2) degree of concern to stakeholders (by stakeholder group) and (3) Ford's degree of control over the issue. The ratings were averaged for Ford and stakeholders (with extra weight assigned to investors and multi-stakeholder inputs as they are key audiences of our reporting) to arrive at ratings for each issue. The issues and their ratings were then plotted on a "materiality matrix". We consider the issues in the upper right sector to be the most material. None of the issues is unimportant; the position of each in the matrix simply represents our understanding of its relative importance to the Company and its stakeholders.
Review of the analysis
The draft matrix was reviewed and revised based on input gathered at an internal workshop of Ford employees representing a variety of functions and geographic regions. It was then reviewed and revised again based on a meeting of a Ceres stakeholder committee that included representatives of environmental NGOs and socially responsible investment organizations. Go here for further discussion of the stakeholder group's role.
