Event Monitoring Overview
The SESAMm platform is organized into two main modules: Event Monitoring and AI Reports. This article covers Event Monitoring,the real-time dashboard for tracking ESG controversy and risk on individual companies and portfolios.
What is Event Monitoring?
Event Monitoring provides ESG controversy data drawn from over 4 million sources across 100 languages. SESAMm processes around 10 million documents every day and links them to the relevant companies in our database, covering more than 5 million entities including public and private companies, as well as infrastructure projects.
The module is made up of four dashboards:
| Event Monitoring Dashboards | |
| Dashboard | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Case Monitoring | ESG controversies and risk scores for a single company |
| SDG Positive Impact | Positive news linked to UN Sustainable Development Goals for a single company |
| Portfolio Monitoring | ESG controversy rankings and risk exposure across a list of companies |
| SDG Portfolio Monitoring | Positive impact aggregated across a portfolio |
How data is structured: Cases, Events, and Articles
Rather than surfacing individual news articles, SESAMm groups related content into a three-level hierarchy. This turns fragmented media coverage into clear, decision-ready signals.
| Cases, Events, and Articles | |
| Level | What it represents |
|---|---|
| Article | An individual news or source document. SESAMm selects the most representative article per cluster based on negativity, source reliability, comprehensiveness, and relevance. |
| Event | A collection of articles about the same incident or development. One incident equals one Event. For example, a single fine, lawsuit, or product recall is one Event. |
| Case | A long-running ESG controversy that aggregates multiple related Events over time, from initial allegations through investigation to any settlement or remediation. A Case can span months or years. |
Example: a company faces discrimination allegations (Event 1), a subsequent regulatory investigation (Event 2), and a final settlement (Event 3). These three Events are grouped inside a single Case titled something like 'Discrimination Lawsuit on Hiring Practices'.
Tip: Articles far apart in time generally split into separate Events, even if they relate to the same broad topic. Time proximity is one of the signals SESAMm uses when clustering.
More information on the Case & Event Methodology can be found here.
The two main scores
Two scores are used throughout the Event Monitoring module:
| The Two Main Scores | |
| Score | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Intensity Score (1–5) | The Intensity Score is a proprietary metric ranging from 1 to 5 that assesses the Structured Severity of an ESG controversy along two axes: the Reversibility of the harm caused and the Corporate & Stakeholder reach. It is then adjusted for the entity's degree of responsibility. |
| Controversy Exposure Score (CES, 0–100) | A continuous, daily score aggregating intensity, volume of coverage, and novelty of events for a company. 100 is the highest risk. The score decays over time if no new controversies appear - it takes approximately two years for a score of 100 to decline to zero with no new events. Useful for comparing companies in the same portfolio. |
Coverage and languages
SESAMm analyzes content across multiple languages in the Event Monitoring dashboards and aggregates articles across languages into the same Cases and Events. Local news sources are captured alongside major international ones, helping surface events early.
You can enable automatic translation for any article in the platform. Go to your account settings and activate the translation feature to have all article content displayed in your preferred language.
What's not included
SESAMm does not use social media (Twitter/X, Facebook, etc.) as a source for ESG controversy data in the Event Monitoring dashboards. Coverage is drawn from news publications, regulatory filings, and public information sources assessed through SESAMm's Article Reliability Score. Customer review platforms (e.g. Glassdoor, Better Business Bureau) may appear as supplementary sources in AI Reports, but are not part of the core controversy data.