B Corp Community Spotlight: PIPs Rewards
After over 30 years as a highly successful entrepreneur in the nonprofit world, Wendy Gordon decided it was time to apply her knowledge to her first for-profit startup. In 2012, Wendy partnered with Yaniv Eyny to launch PIPs, or Positive Impact Points, with the goal of leveraging the power of smart tech and consumer rewards to drive positive impact behaviors. PIPs Rewards is a B Corp certified business and a champion of ‘Best for NYC.’
What Matters Most to Us
“We wanted to create a simple and fun way to nudge people to make better decisions during the course of their daily lives.”
What We Learned
“When we launched in 2012, we knew that we wanted to be a social good enterprise, which is a really holistic concept to us. We were actually the very first company in NYS to apply for and receive benefit corporation status. And I have to say I was really impressed with the process. B Lab, at one point, spent an entire afternoon going through every single question with us to help us better understand and complete the assessment.”
What We Did as a Result
“We have always made a real effort to support our employees. From day one, our team was given the freedom to work remotely and offered health insurance. But, it wasn’t until we completed the assessment that we really understood all of the employee practices that should be put to writing. After we completed the assessment, we created a comprehensive employee manual, which forced us to define practices that were largely informal prior to that. As an example, we implemented a 360-degree employee review system, which is something we had believed in but just hadn’t put into practice.”
Features/Improvements We Are Looking Forward To
“From a business side, the release of our app this year is going to allow businesses of all kinds to break free of the noise and be able to positively impact both consumer and employee behavior. From a company side, we expect to grow and with that growth we anticipate a number of new challenges. We are an experiment on how to reach people. Everyone speaks a slightly different language and responds to things in a different way. We are trying to shift social norms. So having a broad diverse employee base is going to be absolutely vital to our success.”
