#021 Take The B Impact Assessment
How a free online tool can help you uncover a myriad of ways to do good work.
March is B Corporation (B Corp) month.
If you have no idea what a B Corp is (two years ago, I didn’t either) here’s a quick intro¹…
In the United States, a Benefit Corporation is a type of legal structure amongst for-profit businesses that includes positive impact in its legally defined goals.
Essentially, it’s a business that’s not out to just make money — it’s a business that is legally bound to have a positive impact on society, its workers, the community and the environment too.
Unfortunately, elsewhere in the world, this legal structure doesn’t exist.
In Australia, there isn’t really anything between not-for-profit organisations (as recognised by the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission) and for-profit businesses. Social enterprises and other organisations, who have social and environmental outcomes at our core, don’t have an easy or credible way to verify this impact.
And that’s where B Corporations come in.
B Corporations (note: not Benefit Corporations) is a certification that impact-driven organisations can go through, that rigorously tests and verifies an organisations commitment to social and environmental outcomes.
It’s a certification that independently run by team at B Lab, who have offices and teams around the world. To date, they’ve certified over 3,500 companies in 71 countries and over 150 industries.
That’s a whole lot of people and organisations working to make the world a better place.
TLDR: B Lab is an organisation that measures and verifies the social and environmental impact of businesses around the world. If you make it through their rigorous certification process, you are recognised as a B Corporation.
So, what’s the big idea?
While the process to becoming a B Corporation is a vigorous and lengthy one that requires significant time and effort, the B Lab Team have made their assessment and framework open for anyone to take.
They’ve called it, unsurprisingly, the B Impact Assessment.
Over about 150 questions, broken down into five categories (Governance, Workers, Community, Environment and Customers) the assessment takes you through almost every aspect of your business and operating model — breaking down how you make value, for whom, and who benefits from you being in business.
If you thought there was only one way to be a good business (and that was to become a not-for-profit or social enterprise), taking the B Impact Assessment might open your eyes to some smaller changes you can make, as well as letting you know how you compare to others in your industry.
To illustrate, here are a couple of the questions from the assessment:
- What portion of your management is evaluated in writing on their performance with regard to social and environmental targets?
- What is the minimum number of vacations days, sick days, personal days and holidays available to your full-time workers?
- What percentage of your purchases were from companies that are majority-owned by women or individuals from underrepresented populations?
- If you lease your facilities, have you worked with your landlord to implement or maintain water, electricity or waste reduction programs?
Getting Started
Becoming a certified B Corporation involves completing the assessment, submitting it for verification and working with an analyst to give evidence that what you’re claiming is true.
However, you can also just take the assessment and use it to inspire different ways you can create positive impact through your organisation.
From experience, it takes a few hours, if not a full day, to run through the assessment in it’s entirety (I did say it was rigorous). To speed up this process, make sure you’ve got someone who knows your finances, HR, supply chain and customers intimately — you can rope in different people to help with each section.
The B Lab website also mentions you can do a quick pass through in 20–30 minutes. Perhaps I’m too detail-oriented, though, as this hasn’t ever been possible for me. 😅
Once you’ve completed the assessment, you’ll get a score, which you can use to compare to others in your industry, and a list of areas that might be good to focus on changing — usually these are things that are quick fixes within an organisation, rather than fundamental changes.
Conversation Starters
If you need some ways to open this conversation with peers, seniors or even your own internal dialogue, here are some things you could ask:
- Do our organisational goals include any that are driven by social or environmental outcomes?
- Who does our organisation serve? Are there others who might also benefit from our services that we haven’t considered?
- Who benefits from our organisation being in business? E.g. Are we publicly owned, privately owned, a cooperative? How diverse is our ownership?
- Do we know the environmental impact of our work or operations?
Going Further
Taking the assessment is a great way of finding out where your impact lies, and where there are opportunities to grow it. And going through the process is enough on its own, but the natural next step would be to verify your impact and go through the process of becoming a certified B Corporation.
In doing so, you’ll be able to speak more concretely to the social and environmental outcomes you’re contributing to, as well as be part of a global movement of organisations who are dedicated to making business a force for good. There are local communities of B Corporations all over the world, with events, discussions, and directories to facilitate shared growth and learning.
It’s a good community to be a part of!
If you’re curious about the next steps beyond the assessment tool, have a read of this article or, of course, reach out. I’ve had the pleasure of taking a few organisations through the assessment and verification process, and am more than happy to share what I’ve learned along the way.
Notes:
The original introduction came from a piece I wrote in December 2019, after helping my organisation at the time, Code for Australia, become a certified B Corp.
