Project highlights

• Client: Virši-A
• Sector: Retail sale of automotive fuel, transport energy, convenience store chain, electricity
• Website: https://www.virsi.lv
• Country: Latvia

• Service: Stakeholder engagement and double materiality review
• Service info: Expert-led stakeholder engagement and review of the company’s impacts, risks, and opportunities (IROs)
• Project lead:

• Why it matters: Stakeholder engagement ensures companies focus on the sustainability issues that most significantly affect their business and the people and environments they impact
• Outcome: A clear view of stakeholder priorities, helping the business understand what matters most to its key stakeholder groups as well as to validate the proposed sustainability strategic objectives.

The context

Virši-A is one of Latvia’s leading energy and retail companies, operating a nationwide network of fuel stations and convenience stores. Alongside the retail sales of automotive fuel, the company supplies electricity and everyday consumer goods and is actively investing in renewable energy solutions, including biomethane production and solar power for self consumption.

The Sustinere team first supported Virši-A through the company’s first Double Materiality Assessment (DMA), conducted by Sustinere Latvija experts. Two years later, the collaboration continued when Virši-A decided to update its DMA and complement it with a structured stakeholder engagement process.

This decision was driven by several factors. Discussions with auditors and banks highlighted increasing expectations around CSRD-aligned sustainability assessments. At the same time, Virši-A was developing a new corporate strategy with clearly defined sustainability KPIs, making it essential that the company’s priorities were aligned not only internally, but also with the expectations of suppliers, customers, employees, and shareholders.

Before the project, although stakeholders had provided feedback and shared their perspectives, the input was dispersed across various sources and formats, lacking coherence and coordination. Without a structured method to consolidate and analyze this information, valuable insights remained fragmented and were not effectively incorporated into decision-making. This hindered the ability to form a clear, evidence-based understanding of stakeholder priorities. Virši-A therefore required a structured and reliable approach to stakeholder engagement – one that would support both regulatory compliance and strategic planning.

This need became the starting point for the collaboration with Sustinere Latvija on expert-led stakeholder engagement as part of the DMA update.

What we delivered

Sustinere Latvija designed and implemented a tailored stakeholder engagement process aligned with the requirements of a DMA. The work combined quantitative and qualitative methods to assess Virši-A’s impacts, risks, and opportunities (IROs) from the perspective of key stakeholder groups.

The project was led by experts at Sustinere Latvia, who guided Virši-A through the entire process—from stakeholder mapping and survey design to interviews, analysis, and summarizing the results. Particular attention was given to selecting the right stakeholder groups and formulating targeted questions to ensure the process remained focused, relevant, and manageable.

A key element of the approach was clarity and prioritization. Instead of relying on long, generic questionnaires, Sustinere applied a dual methodology that combined structured surveys with in-depth qualitative interviews. This approach enabled a broader range of stakeholders to participate while also capturing rich, nuanced insights. The survey allowed for efficient data collection across a wide stakeholder base, while the interviews provided an opportunity to explore key themes in more depth, surfacing practical suggestions and strategic concerns that would likely be missed through survey data alone.

This integrated method ensured that both quantitative breadth and qualitative depth were achieved, resulting in a well-rounded, evidence-based understanding of stakeholder expectations and priorities.

The outcome was a clear and well-documented overview of stakeholder priorities, fully integrated into the updated DMA. The results provided Virši-A with robust, defensible data that can be used in sustainability reporting, discussions with auditors and banks, and internal decision-making.

Just as importantly, the findings were communicated internally through expert-led presentations to the management team, helping them understand not only the results but also the reasoning behind them. In addition, the main outcomes of the process were shared with shareholders, ensuring transparency and reinforcing the strategic importance of stakeholder engagement.

In their words

Sustainability work at Virši-A is closely linked to strategy and everyday business decisions, and structured stakeholder engagement plays a key role in strengthening this connection. Before the project, stakeholder feedback did exist, but it was dispersed across different channels. Insights from suppliers and customers were difficult to gather and compare in a consistent way. Bringing in external experts helped the company step back, assess the situation objectively, and build a structured process that would have been difficult to develop internally.

As the work progressed, the value of the engagement became increasingly clear through the quality and credibility of the results. The methodology provided Virši-A with a solid, evidence-based foundation for internal discussions, sustainability reporting, and dialogue with external stakeholders.