While much of the conversation around ESG focuses on environmental impact reporting, many companies place as much or more weight on diversity, equity, and other social issues. “We’re a people-focused business helping people get hired, so we emphasize social responsibility,” said Hannah Erickson, senior ESG program manager at talent marketplace platform Upwork. “We’re very focused on social issues.”

Upwork’s third annual Impact Report, released in March, incorporated several different ESG standards and frameworks, including the CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), SASB, and the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). While Erickson sees these frameworks as helpful tools, she encourages companies new to ESG reporting to look past the acronyms.

“People get lost in the alphabet soup, but it’s not as complicated as it looks at first blush,” she says. “For companies crafting ESG reports, the frameworks are really getting at: Can you back up claims of being good corporate citizens? Can you disclose the numbers and follow up from year to year?”

These claims can relate to how ESG issues affect a business and how companies impact the world. Fishman at BSR wants companies to look beyond financial materiality—potentially significant losses caused by climate change—to also report on their outward impacts, “not just because it’s the right thing to do but also because, from a strategic perspective, those outward impacts tend to become more financially material over time. There’s interconnectivity between those two dimensions.”

Balancing the reported numbers with a narrative about what the company is doing to effect change can turn an impersonal, data-heavy ESG report into one that stakeholders of all stripes can relate to, says Erickson.

“As long as you have the right questions in the back of your mind—What’s the impact? What’s important? What can we address?—you have the most important pieces covered,” she says. “And that should guide you more than all of the acronyms and the noise.”