How to prepare for an ESG due diligence questionnaire

To prepare for an ESG due diligence questionnaire, pick one person to own it, gather your facts across five areas (data privacy, workforce, governance, environmental impact and responsible product use), attach evidence wherever you can, and answer gaps honestly with a date for fixing them. Most early-stage questionnaires are a few pages long. With the right documents in one place, you can finish in an afternoon.

The questionnaire usually lands in the middle of everything else in diligence. That is why a little preparation now saves you a stressful week later.

What is an ESG due diligence questionnaire?

It is a set of questions an investor uses to understand how your company manages environmental, social and governance risks. ESG here is less about saving the planet and more about spotting problems that could hurt the investment: a data breach, a toxic culture, a founder conflict or a product that attracts regulators.

Most VC questionnaires are built from a few well-known sources. The Invest Europe ESG due diligence questionnaire is widely used by private equity and venture firms, and VentureESG’s universe of questions underpins several UK VC templates. MMC Ventures, for example, says its short ESG questionnaire draws on that VentureESG list. Many funds then track the same topics each year after investment using the ESG_VC framework.

What questions are in a typical startup ESG questionnaire?

The wording varies, but the topics are remarkably consistent. This table shows what tends to come up and the evidence that answers it best.

Topic	Typical questions	Best evidence
Data privacy and security	What personal data do you process? Do you have a privacy notice, access controls, a breach process?	Privacy notice, security policy, list of data processors
Workforce	Headcount, contractors, diversity monitoring, pay approach, benefits, training, health and safety	Headcount summary, aggregated diversity data, H and S policy
Governance	Board composition, conflicts of interest, who owns compliance, whistleblowing	Board list, code of conduct, conflicts register
Environmental impact	Have you measured your footprint? What drives it? Any targets?	ESG report with carbon footprint, environmental policy
Responsible product use	Could the product be misused or cause harm? How do you test for bias or safety?	Short written risk assessment, product policies

Some questionnaires add supply chain questions (who your main suppliers are and whether you check them) and community questions (volunteering, giving, local hiring). They are usually lighter touch at early stage.

How to prepare in a week

You do not need to drop everything. Spread it across a normal working week.

1. Day one: name an owner. One person drafts and signs off every answer. Consistency matters more than polish.
2. Day two: gather the facts. Headcount, contractor numbers, where customer data lives, which tools process it, who sits on the board. Most of this is in your head or your HR tool already.
3. Day three: get your carbon baseline. Investors increasingly expect at least a rough carbon footprint. For a small team this takes under half an hour with the right tool.
4. Day four: check your policies. List what you have in writing. Anything missing becomes a dated commitment rather than a gap. Our guide to the ESG policies to have before you fundraise covers the core set.
5. Day five: draft, review, send. Read every answer against your data room. If your deck says 12 employees and the questionnaire says 14, someone will ask why.

How to answer when you do not have something yet

Gaps are normal. Investors expect them from a young company. The trick is to answer in three parts: where you are now, what you are doing about it and by when.

For example:

Do you have a written environmental policy? Not yet. We measured our footprint for the first time this year (about 4 tCO2e, mainly flights and our co-working share). We will adopt a short environmental policy, owned by our COO, before completion.

Do you monitor workforce diversity? We collect gender data and will introduce a voluntary, anonymous diversity survey covering other characteristics this quarter. With 9 people we will report it in aggregate only.

Both answers show awareness, a sensible plan and a named owner. That is what investors are looking for.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Overclaiming. “Carbon neutral” or “net zero” without evidence is a red flag. If you have bought offsets, say exactly what you bought and how much.
• Copying a big company’s policy. A 30-page corporate code of conduct in a 6-person startup’s data room tells the investor it has never been read.
• Inconsistent numbers. Headcount, revenue and emissions should match across the questionnaire, the deck and the data room.
• Ignoring what your report leaves out. Be clear about the boundary of your carbon footprint. ESG Now, for example, covers energy, company vehicles, business travel, waste and water, and estimates commuting, homeworking and (optionally) purchases such as software and cloud services from spend. It does not cover downstream Scope 3 sources such as the use of products you sell. Say which figures are estimates and what is outside the boundary.

What if you receive a long, corporate-style questionnaire?

Sometimes a fund, or a corporate venture arm, sends a questionnaire written for much larger companies. It might ask about an ESG risk register, a standalone ESG policy, or supplier audits across multiple countries.

Do not panic and do not invent processes to fill the boxes. Answer what applies, mark the rest as not applicable with a short reason, and add a covering note explaining your stage. Something like “We are a 9-person company in a single co-working office. Where a question assumes a formal management system, we have described our current practice and what we plan to put in place as we grow.”

Investors who send long templates usually know they will get short answers from startups. A calm, honest response that shows you understood each question is what they will remember.

Where ESG Now fits

ESG Now is a guided questionnaire that turns what you know about your business into the documents an investor asks for: a shareable ESG report, a carbon footprint using UK government conversion factors, and a private action plan that shows which policies you already have in place and which are worth adding next. Every calculation is shown in the appendix, and each figure is labelled as measured, estimated or a data gap. You can read more about the methodology.

Your answers save as you go, and your first report is free. Start your report and you will have most of the environmental answers ready, and a clear list of policy gaps, before the questionnaire arrives.

Once you have the documents, our ESG data room checklist shows how to organise them, and the startups raising investment hub has everything else in one place.