Greenlandic regulations require oil companies to conduct a Social Impact Assessment before undertaking exploration drilling. A key part of this assessment is a Social Baseline Study (SBS), which provides descriptions of existing social conditions and development trends and goals in communities that could potentially be affected by exploration drilling in the area. Four oil and gas companies operating in Baffin Bay, offshore of Northwest Greenland, Cairn Energy plc, Cono-coPhillips, Maersk Oil Kalaallit Nunaat A/S and Shell Greenland A/S, will potentially all be active in the same sphere of operations in the coming years and therefore agreed to undertake a collaborative SBS in 2013. The overall objective of the SBS was to build a strong base for preventing, mitigating and managing potential negative impact and enhancing the potential positive impact of the activities to be undertaken in the area. The main aim of the collaborative approach to the SBS was to achieve coherent and coordinated community engagement and to limit the risk of stakeholder fatigue. An inter-company collaboration, such as the one described, is the first of its type in Greenland. This article presents the process of conducting the SBS and reflects on the drivers behind the new collaborative approach from a 'social license to operate' perspective. It concludes that three triggers can be used to explain the motivation behind the collaborative company approach. It further concludes that collaborative approaches to local engagement can be the key to success in remote and sparsely populated areas, such as in the case presented.