Are Spreadsheets Getting in the Way of Good Engagement? 5 Signs for RI Teams

Let’s talk about spreadsheets. You know them well — they’re good for tracking just about anything. Flexible and familiar, they’ve likely been your companion for engagement tracking.

While some firms may have optimized spreadsheets for engagement tracking, many find that as engagement demands scale, these tools introduce inefficiencies that limit progress. This is especially problematic now that stewardship teams are stretched thinner than ever.

Our team has had many conversations over the past months with stewardship professionals who are considering a move from spreadsheets to a platform designed for engagement tracking. In this blog, we’ve synthesized their experience and feedback into five common themes.

Sign 1. Reports Are Taking Longer to Create — And There’s More of Them

A stewardship analyst at a sustainable investment fund told us about their difficulty generating engagement reports when their data is scattered across multiple Excel files.

“I find it challenging to track the progress of engagements that span multiple years,” they explained, “especially when we have multiple requests for a single company.”

As client and regulatory expectations grow, reporting has to be faster, more detailed, and more customized. But spreadsheets aren’t built for that. Reports that once took hours now take days, forcing teams to spend more time cleaning and formatting data instead of analyzing results.

When clients and regulators require portfolio-specific engagement reporting with clear evidence of escalation pathways, spreadsheets simply can’t keep up. In a webcast hosted by Responsible Investor on the evolution of stewardship practices, Matt Crossman, Stewardship Director at Rathbones, points out a rising preference among clients for “bespoke, portfolio-specific reports over generic summaries.”

What Better Looks Like

Engagement platforms generate granular reports on demand, so you can quickly filter by company, theme, or timeframe instead of manually pulling everything together.

Ask yourself: How much lead time do you need to prepare client-specific engagement reports?

Sign 2. It’s Hard to See Engagement Progress & Trends

Tracking engagements individually in spreadsheets might seem manageable initially, but complexity quickly mounts. Can you clearly see when an engagement moves forward, stalls, or needs escalation? Are you confident in your ability to recognize broader trends — like identifying ESG themes gaining momentum or companies repeatedly failing to meet commitments?

Spreadsheets, built for static lists, obscure both these important views. As your engagement data expands across multiple years, geographies, and portfolios, it becomes increasingly difficult to track tangible progress or recognize wider trends. Capturing insights on engagement outcomes, escalation milestones, or multi-year campaign effectiveness requires tedious manual searching, pivot tables, or separate analytical tools — risking inefficiency and lost insights.

This limitation makes it harder to:

• Track clear, measurable progress on individual engagements.
• Recognize important ESG themes across multiple companies or funds.
• Demonstrate tangible outcomes and escalate engagements effectively.

What Better Looks Like

Engagement platforms simplify these tasks, offering clear visualizations and built-in analytics, allowing you to quickly grasp both detailed progress and broader trends without manual data manipulation.

Ask yourself: Can your current approach clearly show both the progress of individual engagements and the broader trends that matter to you?

Sign 3. You’re Spending a Lot of Time on Documentation

As engagement work expands, so does the administrative effort required to track it. Many teams struggle to balance documentation with the actual work of engaging companies.

In the Responsible Investor webcast, Crossman emphasized the importance of consistent effort in stewardship: “If you’re training for a marathon, anything might happen on race day. But if I’m sponsoring you, what really matters is that you’re consistently getting off the sofa three or four times a week.”

Yet spreadsheet-based tracking can inadvertently flip this equation. Instead of actively engaging companies (the real training), stewardship teams can end up buried in documentation (writing down every step of training rather than running). The result can lead to less meaningful engagement and more administrative overhead, which can undermine long-term success.

What Better Looks Like

Dedicated engagement tools cut down on manual data entry with simpler workflows, templates, and automation. They free your team to focus on the work that matters.

Ask yourself: How much time is your team spending logging engagements compared to actually conducting them?

Sign 4. Collaboration Is Messy

Even when spreadsheets are cloud-based, they’re rarely optimized for complex, collaborative work. This leads to operational headaches like version control problems, duplicated efforts, and inconsistent data.

One stewardship specialist recounted discovering three colleagues had independently reached out to the same company on a similar issue. Another ESG analyst highlighted the constant struggle of maintaining consistent data across multiple funds while respecting individual manager autonomy.

When multiple contributors — responsible investment specialists, proxy voting teams, and stewardship analysts — each maintain separate spreadsheet versions, teams quickly face confusion and inefficiencies.

What Better Looks Like

A modern engagement platform centralizes documentation and simplifies team collaboration. It ensures everyone has the right visibility into each other’s engagement activities, eliminating duplication and version control issues.

Ask yourself: Have you experienced version control issues or duplicated engagement efforts in the past?

Sign 5. Front-Office Integration Is a Constant Challenge

Portfolio managers and analysts sit at the core of investment decisions, but they’re not always easy for stewardship teams to engage consistently. Spreadsheets can exacerbate this issue, creating isolated data silos disconnected from front-office workflows.

One global head of stewardship shared with us that while their spreadsheet-based tracking is technically functional, “it doesn’t integrate well with the portfolio managers’ daily processes, making it hard to get timely updates on engagements or ensure coordinated messaging.” This lack of integration means stewardship teams often struggle to capture critical engagement insights from the front office, and portfolio managers are left without a clear picture of ongoing stewardship activities.

Key challenges include:

• Limited ability to align engagement data directly with portfolio managers’ holdings in real-time.
• Difficulty capturing timely front-office feedback on engagement priorities or escalation decisions.
• Front-office hesitancy to update spreadsheet-based tracking due to its complexity or disconnect from their primary systems.

What Better Looks Like

Engagement platforms remove these barriers by syncing engagement tracking with portfolio data, ESG research, and investment workflows — so everything is in one place.

Ask yourself: Are your portfolio managers fully informed and aligned with your stewardship activities, or are communication gaps holding you back?

Related: Bring ISS ESG Data Into VerityESG for Better Decision-Making

Bottom Line

Spreadsheets are great until they’re not. As investor expectations and regulatory requirements evolve, it may be time to make a choice: stick with familiar but increasingly inadequate spreadsheet-based tracking, or adopt tools specifically designed for modern engagement. Each of these five signs points to growing pains that many successful stewardship programs face as they mature. The most effective teams recognize when their tools are limiting rather than enabling their work.

What Better Engagement Can Look Like

Verity offers an engagement tracker that helps funds capture data, track the full engagement lifecycle, and streamline compliance and reporting. All in one integrated and configurable software platform.

Get a VerityESG Demo >>