How We Are Using Our Business as a Force For Good: Part 1

At Rule29, we believe that part of making creative matter is actually living our values, working on constantly evolving, and being open daily to listen, learn, and shift where we need to be more authentic. It means living out the goodness we hope impacts the world we live in.

This is one of the main reasons we became a certified B Corp. Another one is to have the infrastructure, oversight, standards, and resourcing from an organization that includes thousands of like-minded companies from around the world.

In our commitment to become a B Corp, we signed the declaration of interdependence that includes our agreement to share what we are doing to be a force for good internally and with those around us. We formed a B Corp internal team that works on five key pillars of improvement: Governance, Our Team, Community, Environment, and Clients.

For this quarterly installment, we want to share about some areas of awareness and improvement with our Governance, our Clients, and Environmental impact. Installments going forward will focus on different dimensions of our five-pillar activities as well as suggestions we think would be helpful.

Governance

Let’s start with Governance. Now, governance, in general, represents what a company can do to enhance policies and practices pertaining to its mission, ethics, accountability, and transparency. One of the items of Governance B Corp recommends for any size organization is to have an advisory board. This allows an organization to gain wisdom and oversight to help run its organization at a higher level. Our Rule29 advisory board offers assistance with key business functions and challenges us at all levels of the company, including strategic direction, quality improvement, and program effectiveness assessment.

To see our advisory board, check out our Advisor page here: https://rule29.com/advisors/.

Customers

B Corp asks us to assess areas of our organization on a regular basis to have data for our customer impact as well as provide information to help improve ourselves in a variety of areas. The next area we are highlighting is customer or client satisfaction surveys. B Corp asks us to do the following: 

The Customers Impact Area evaluates the value that your company creates for your direct customers and the consumers of your products or services through topics such as ethical and positive marketing, warranty and quality assurance of products and services, data privacy, data security, and more.

They look at whether companies have mechanisms in place that ensure they are collecting information to understand whether their products or services are actually having a positive effect on those buying or using them. They ask about feedback outreach and success monitoring within the company. 

The following points are helpful to use when improving our customer area:

• Ask our clients how our work has impacted their teams and customers. This data will support our case studies.
• Set check-in milestones so we aren’t getting feedback only at the end of a project. It’s important to check in with our clients along the way to see how we’re doing and what we can do better.
• Help the client understand the terminology we use so there isn’t any ambiguity.

Environment

The final area of our current work this quarter is in the area of the environment. One of the more intriguing ways to care for our planet is digital decluttering. Here are two fascinating facts:

• A study commissioned by energy company OVO reckons Brits send more than 64 million unnecessary emails every day, and that if every adult in the UK sent one fewer “thank you” email a day, we would save more than 16,433 tonnes of carbon a year – equivalent to 81,152 flights to Madrid or taking 3,334 diesel cars off the road. (Source: “Think Before You Thank” by OVO Energy)
• It is estimated that the average office worker receives 121 emails per day, and that almost half of these will be spam. So if we received 60 spam emails, 31 standard emails, and 30 emails with attachments, these would equal approximately 1,642g CO2e per day. (Source: Carbon Literacy)

With these numbers in mind, we’ve decided to unsubscribe from emails we don’t have enough time to read or are no longer interested in. Not only will this save us a lot of space in our inbox, it will also decrease the impact of our carbon footprint. 

Here are some ways you can declutter your digital life:

Set aside 30 minutes to one hour per month to declutter:

• Delete old emails
• Delete spam folders
• Unsubscribe to newsletters you don’t care about
• Switch off notification emails to things like social media sites

To further reduce your impact:

Video:

• Avoid video calls when possible
• Use Huddle for quick calls rather than Zoom
• Consider switching to Google Meet which uses 100% renewable energy 

Websites:

• Switch to a green hosting provider
• Reduce the size of files on your website
• Reduce animation
• Switch video to “play on-demand”
• Use bookmarks to avoid searching for articles you wish to revisit

We hope you find this information helpful! In the spirit of continual improvement and making these posts as impactful as possible, please let us know what you think and what questions you may have. Let us know here (link).

For more on the B Corp movement, visit https://bcorporation.net/about-b-corps.