How does ETI membership compare to hiring a consultancy to help us with human rights due diligence?

Consultancy engagements tend to be episodic and expensive — they produce reports and frameworks, but then they end. The knowledge walks out of the door with the consultants, your team is left to implement recommendations without the expertise that generated them, and when the next challenge arrives you find yourself going back to square one and paying again. Over time, this cycle is not only costly — it actively prevents your organisation from building the internal capability it needs. Your people never quite get the chance to develop genuine expertise of their own, and the skills void compounds year on year.

ETI membership works differently. Rather than delivering a one-off output, it provides continuous access to nearly 30 years of accumulated expertise, structured to help your team develop real, lasting capability at every stage of the journey. As your people become more confident in the fundamentals, ETI's programmes, workshops and peer learning evolve with them — supporting more advanced work, helping them navigate new challenges as they emerge, and ensuring that the skills and knowledge they build stay inside your organisation rather than being rented from outside it.

This matters because the human rights due diligence landscape is not static. Legislation is developing, supply chain risks are shifting, and the expectations of investors and civil society are rising. An organisation whose team is genuinely skilled and continuously learning is far better placed to adapt than one that depends on bringing in external expertise every time something changes.

Crucially, ETI's tripartite structure — bringing companies, trade unions and NGOs together — offers something no consultancy can replicate: the multi-stakeholder credibility that regulators and investors increasingly treat as the benchmark for authentic commitment. Any company can commission a report. ETI membership demonstrates that you are genuinely engaged in the work — and building the internal capacity to keep doing it.

Many of our members find that joining ETI costs significantly less than a single consultancy project, while delivering far more durable and compounding results over time.

Find out more about ETI membership