Funders and enterprise customers increasingly ask which Sustainable Development Goals you contribute to. Answering at Goal level is the most common mistake — and the easiest to fix.
A grant application asks which Goals you advance. A procurement questionnaire from an enterprise client asks the same. A lender's ESG screen maps to them. The Sustainable Development Goals have quietly become the shared vocabulary people use to ask what your organisation contributes. The three-layer problem People say "the SDGs" and mean three different things. Seventeen Goals are the headline ambitions. Beneath them sit 169 Targets — the specific commitments. Beneath those, 231 unique Indicators — the actual measurements. Almost every reporting mistake comes from claiming at Goal level when you can only evidence at Indicator level. SDG 8 is Decent Work and Economic Growth. Nearly every organisation that employs anyone can gesture at it. That is precisely the problem: a claim no organisation could fail to make carries no information. What a defensible claim looks like Compare a claim at Target level — Target 8.5, full and productive employment and equal pay for work of equal value — and you have committed to something checkable. At Indicator level, average hourly earnings by sex , you have committed to a number you either have or do not have. So instead of "we are strongly committed to SDG 8", the answer that scores well reads: "We report against Target 8.5 using average hourly earnings by sex; our 2025 gap was 4.2%, down from 7.1% in 2023." Claim less, evidence it In our client work the same failure recurs: a page listing twelve of the seventeen Goals, with narrative and no figures. Breadth without evidence scores badly on almost every supplier scorecard, and it creates exposure — twelve unevidenced claims are twelve things that can be challenged. Three evidenced Targets beat eight asserted ones. And it usually costs very little, because the data already exists: payroll, invoices, meter readings, incident logs. Start from what you already collect and map upward, rather than starting from the Goals and hunting for data to fit them. The baseline nobody records The single most common reason an otherwise good report fails review is a missing baseline. Without a starting number, an improvement claim cannot be assessed — and "significantly reduced" without a figure is the most challenged phrase in sustainability reporting. If you have no baseline, you have three honest options: reconstruct it from records that already exist, declare this year as the baseline and say so plainly, or report the level rather than the change. All three are credible. Implying a change you cannot evidence is not.