CSRHub Blog Research on ESG metrics and comments on sustainability best practice

ESG content set available for purchase now

CSRHub, one of the world’s broadest and most consistent sets of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings, is pleased to offer ESG Business Intelligence data via the Open:FactSet Marketplace as an official provider. It is available for evaluation via FactSet’s cloud-based Data Evaluation platform now.

You can see a new video describing CSRHub’s ESG Business Intelligence data here.

“Launching CSRHub’s ESG Business Intelligence Data on the Open:FactSet Marketplace allows us to greatly expand our reach in keeping with our mission to empower stakeholders with easy to use consensus ratings to help improve sustainability performance worldwide,” said Cynthia Figge, CEO and Co-founder of CSRHub.

“CSRHub is an excellent addition to the Open:FactSet Marketplace’s network of providers,” says Lauren Stevens, Senior Vice President, Open:FactSet Strategy, FactSet. “ESG data is in strong demand among investment managers, and this new offering gives our clients another dataset to leverage when managing risk and looking for new investment opportunities.”

CSRHub data helps investors, corporations, and consumers integrate ESG and sustainability into their decision-making processes. Using a patented algorithm that aggregates and harmonizes disparate data from over 600 ESG sources, CSRHub generates a consensus score for the ESG performance of more than 18,000 companies from 134 industries in 141 countries. Data from CSRHub’s big data process can be used to increase corporate market value, uncover portfolio opportunities and risks, and integrate ESG trends into other Business Intelligence data sets. For instance, CSRHub’s ESG signal can:

• Identify risks and opportunities. CSRHub ratings represent the consensus opinion of a company’s ESG performance. Asset owners, portfolio managers, and investment analysts can compare their own assessment of a company against the CSRHub consensus and build alpha-creating strategies. CSRHub’s score is also used for screening potential investments and for examining the social impact of an existing portfolio.
• Benchmark corporate ESG performance. Companies can compare their CSRHub rating to those of their peers or competitors using CSRHub’s broad industry and geographic coverage. Through these comparisons, managers can build strategies to improve upon existing practices, plan new sustainability-related programs and reporting, better manage their stakeholders’ perception of corporate values and social impact, and evaluate their brand’s CSR performance.
• Backtest theories about ESG behavior. CSRHub offers monthly data back to 2008. Because CSRHub ratings are based on millions of data items drawn from hundreds of sources, they are stable, fit into a smooth distribution, and correlate well with other indicators. CSRHub ratings are used by hundreds of universities and have been cited in many publications.

CSRHub’s ESG Business Intelligence data feed is now available for purchase as an official provider on the Open:FactSet Marketplace (OFM).

For more information and to get started, see https://open.factset.com/products/csrhub-esg-business-intelligence/en-us.

About CSRHub

CSRHub offers one of the world’s broadest and most consistent set of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings, covering 18,000 companies. Its Big Data algorithm combines millions of data points on ESG performance from hundreds of sources, including leading ESG analyst raters, to produce consensus scores on all aspects of corporate social responsibility and sustainability. CSRHub ratings can be used to drive corporate, investor and consumer decisions.

CSRHub
Media: Ruth Edwards
csrhub.news@csrhub.com

CSRHub is honored to once again have our metrics included in the Drucker Institute Management Top 250 Rankings this year.

The Drucker Institute has brought together five dimensions of corporate performance—Customer Satisfaction, Employee Engagement and Development, Innovation, Social Responsibility and Financial Strength—to create a holistic perspective based on Peter Drucker’s core principles for ranking the top 250 companies worldwide.

"This was an important year for the Drucker Institute's company rankings, which form the foundation of The Wall Street Journal's 'Management Top 250' list, because there is so much attention now around the idea of companies balancing the needs of all stakeholders and not automatically putting shareholders first," said Rick Wartzman, head of the Drucker Institute's KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society. "This orientation—reflected and reinforced by the Business Roundtable's statement in August embracing a stakeholder model and rejecting shareholder primacy—has, in turn, spurred rapidly rising interest among executives, boards and investors in environmental, social and governance metrics, along with other non-financial indicators. Given that, there are more eyeballs than ever on our Drucker model. And so it's essential that the data we use in our rankings be unassailable. We're thrilled to count CSRHub as one of our key partners because we know that the data it provides is always of the absolute highest quality."

You can learn more about the 2019 measure on The Drucker Institute’s website at https://www.drucker.institute/programs/company-rankings/, with the full ranking of all 640 companies available at https://www.drucker.institute/2019-drucker-institute-company-ranking/.

To learn more about CSRHub, our ESG/CSR metrics or how you can improve your ESG scores, contact us here.

CSRHub CEO and Co-founder, Cynthia Figge will be speaking at the Sustainable Brands New Metrics ’19 Conference, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, held November 18-20, 2019.

Cynthia will be joining a keynote plenary panel speaking on Trends and Opportunities in Values-Based Investor Engagement on Wednesday November 20, 2019.

This session will discuss the trend of values-based investing as part of the rapidly changing sustainable investing space. The conversation will cover the main ways in which investment patterns are being adjusted or transformed in light of the growing importance of sustainability issues and new types of relevant company data. Participants will also address the effects that these new dynamics are having on relationships between companies and investors.

Trends and Opportunities in Values-Based Investor Engagement
Wednesday November 20, 2019

	Cora Olsen, Global Lead, Integrated Reporting, Novo Nordisk
	Megan Maltenfort, Director, Corporate Responsibility & Sustainability, Campbell Soup
	Cynthia Figge, CEO and Co-Founder, CSRHub

Friends of CSRHub will receive 20% Discount on registration!

Please register here with code “CSRHub”.

A recent IR Magazine and Corporate Secretary survey found a disconnect from company to company, with regards to who is responsible for ESG communications. The results show ESG communications responsibility changes according to various factors, including cap size, region and company size.

Primary responsibility for ESG communications rests with a dedicated sustainability team at more than a third of companies polled, while responsibility lies with corporate communications at a further 28 percent. Depending on cap size, responsibility lies predominantly with the corporate or company secretary, while corporate communications tend to hold responsibility for ESG at smaller cap companies.[1]

As a result, IR Magazine and Corporate Secretary have launched a series of forums on ESG integration to bring together investor relations, sustainability professionals and corporate secretaries from a variety of public companies, to discuss how to take an integrated approach to investor expectations on ESG factors. The events will help companies make sense of the evolving trends around ESG and take action to improve relationships with shareholders, future-proof their businesses, and ensure a smooth proxy season. The team behind the events are keen to ensure that attending companies leave with a to-do-list that they can implement immediately.

Following the success of last year’s forum which saw more than 150 professionals in attendance, CSRHub is partnering with IR Magazine and Corporate Secretary to help companies respond to the growing demand for improved ESG practices and disclosures. The forum in London takes place on November 7.

The ESG Integration Forum that takes place in New York (December 5) is part of Sustainable Finance Week, a series of events based in New York focused on accelerating the next $10 trillion dollars in sustainable finance. There will be more than 1500 investors and corporates in attendance across all events that week - so there's only one place to be that week!

To find out more and book your place:

ESG Integration Forum – Europe, November 7, London: IRMagazine.com/esgeurope/

ESG Integration Forum, December 5, New York: IRMagazine.com/esg/

[1] IR Magazine Partners, ESG & Investor Engagement, 2019 https://www.irmagazine.com/content/esg-investor-engagement

The Harvard Business Review (HBR) just released its prestigious ranking of the 100 best-performing CEOs in the world. The top CEO in the S&P Global 1200 is Jensen Huang, CEO of the U.S. technology company NVIDIA. The top ten CEOs are from companies including Nvidia, Salesforce.com, Kering, Texas Instruments, Iberdrola, Adobe, Mastercard, KBC, Microsoft and LVMH. You can see the full list here. 

HBR notes that they made an important change in methodology this year.  “Since 2015 our ranking has been based not only on financial performance but also on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) 

ratings. For the past four years we’ve weighted ESG scores to account for 20% of each CEO’s final ranking. This year we tweaked the formula, increasing that share to 30%. The shift reflects the fact that a rapidly growing number of funds and individuals now focus on far more than bottom-line metrics when they make investment decisions. One sign of this changing sensibility: In August 2019, 181 U.S. CEOs who are members of the Business Roundtable signed a statement affirming that the purpose of a corporation is to serve not just shareholders but four other groups of stakeholders: employees, customers, suppliers, and communities.”

This change in weighting significantly impacted ranking results. For example, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, a top CEO every year since 2014, fell off the list owing to relatively low ESG scores. “The incorporation of 30% ESG data signals a growing shift of perception in what matters to be the best,” said Cynthia Figge, CEO and Cofounder of CSRHub. “We are honored to have CSRHub’s ESG (environment, social, governance) metrics included in the methodology for the fourth year in a row, and now determine 15% of the HBR Ranking of the World’s Best-Performing CEOs.”

You can see the full report available in Harvard Business Review Magazine, found here.

To learn more about CSRHub, our ESG/CSR metrics or how you can improve your ESG scores, contact us here.

CSRHub offers one of the world’s broadest and most consistent set of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings, covering 18,000 companies. Its patented Big Data algorithm combines millions of data points on ESG performance from hundreds of sources, including leading ESG analyst raters, to produce consensus scores on all aspects of corporate social responsibility and sustainability. CSRHub ratings can be used to drive corporate, investor and consumer decisions. CSRHub has been a Certified B Corporation since November of 2010. For more information, visit www.csrhub.com.