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Beginning our B-Corp journey – Part 1

Over the coming months, we’ll use our blog to document our journey to becoming B-Corp certified.

This is the first post so consider it our jumping off point! It’s an honest review of where we’re at versus where we’d like to be. We’ll write another post when we’re a little further along to update you on the progress that we’re making so stay tuned…

So what exactly is B-Corp?

For anyone who isn’t already aware, the B-Corporation is a movement that aims to transform the global economy so that it benefits all people, not just a few. It encourages businesses to become a force for good; holding them to account so that they consider the impact they have on people, the community and the planet. Businesses that succeed in meeting the B-Corp standards are then awarded the official certification.

Why did Pixel Fridge want to become B-Corp certified?

The more we learnt about B-Corp the more it seemed like a natural evolution for Pixel Fridge. Balancing purpose alongside profit has always been important to us. You can read more about why we wanted to become certified on another blog on our website.

Step one: The Impact Assessment

The Impact Assessment is an online questionnaire that is divided into five key areas (plus an extra section for any further disclosures you wish to make):

1. Governance
2. Workers
3. Community
4. Environment
5. Customers
6. Disclosures

Each question explores an area of how you operate as a business, and is scored against a set number of points. By working your way through the questionnaire, it becomes fairly clear which areas you need to focus on in order to improve your score. To move onto the next stage of the process (where your assessment is reviewed by a member of the B-Corp team) you need to score above 80 (out of a possible 200).

What we learnt from our Impact Assessment:

We scored 45 which seemed quite low, but what the Assessment highlighted is that there are many areas where we are actually meeting the requirements – we’re just lacking the formal documentation. For example, team members have been encouraged to do training and a budget has been set aside for this – but it’s not been written up in a formal policy. So the Assessment has been helpful in identifying some easy changes we can make in order to score better at the next round. Formal documentation is an area that, as a young business, we need to improve upon in order to do better. By developing documentation we’d be holding ourselves accountable which is something that’s important to us.

Where we’re scoring highly:

These are the areas that we’re already doing well in.

1. Employee satisfaction
2. Employee wages
3. Employee benefits
4. Company transparency
5. We provide great value and impact for our clients
6. We look after customer data

Areas where we’d like to improve:

The Assessment has also given us some ideas to explore for improvement in other areas. These include:

1. Formalisation of our processes, benefits, values
2. Developing solid KPIs and metrics around our impact
3. Looking into what we can do to improve opportunities in our industry for under-represented groups
4. Research pensions and provide an option to move across to an ethical investment portfolio
5. Consider our suite of company benefits further

What are the next steps?

We still have a way to go, but we’re working through the Assessment section by section, and addressing any areas where we feel we can be better. By formalising and addressing our documentation and policies as a company across the first two sections, our scores have already improved. Over the coming weeks we’ll spend some time working on the remaining areas so watch this space!