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

CSRHub CEO and Co-founder Bahar Gidwani will be speaking at Sustainable Brand’s New Metrics ‘14, September 24-25, 2014 in Boston, MA.  Bahar will be on a discussion panel, Tapping the Crowd for Insights and Solutions: Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding, and the Personal Data Economy, along with executives from:Reki Hattori, CTO, Datacoup

Thomas Malone, Director, Climate Co-Lab

Gwen Nguyen, Cause Director, Indiegogo

Bahar Gidwani, CEO, CSRHub

Tapping the Crowd for Insights and Solutions: Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding, and the Personal Data Economy

There is currently a boom in tech advances enabling companies to tap the crowd for multiple new types of data and solutions to complex business problems. Whether we're talking about new ways to collect, store and trade personal data, or new tech vehicles for pooling collective intelligence in response to climate change, or creative applications of crowdfunding platforms – there is a lot of valuable knowledge in this field for sustainability, marketing and finance professionals!

Use the code NWSPKNM14 for 20% off  your pass and join us in Boston, Sept. 24-26.

Bahar Gidwani is CEO and Co-founder of CSRHub.  He has built and run large technology-based businesses for many years. Bahar holds a CFA, worked on Wall Street with Kidder, Peabody, and with McKinsey & Co. Bahar has consulted to a number of major companies and currently serves on the board of several software and Web companies. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and an undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy. Bahar is a member of the SASB Advisory Board.  He plays bridge, races sailboats, and is based in New York City.

CSRHub provides access to corporate social responsibility and sustainability ratings and information on 9,100+ companies from 135 industries in 104 countries. By aggregating and normalizing the information from 339 data sources, CSRHub has created a broad, consistent rating system and a searchable database that links millions of rating elements back to their source. Managers, researchers and activists use CSRHub to benchmark company performance, learn how stakeholders evaluate company CSR practices and seek ways to change the world.

By Bahar Gidwani

CSRHub recently extended the historic data available to its subscribers back to 2008.  Our users can now study the month to month change in sustainability performance for thousands of companies from December 2008 to the present.

We current rate 7,200 companies, using data drawn from more than 200 sources.  Our data set has been growing steadily at about 100 new companies rated per month.

We use the wide range of data types and perspectives our sources give us to adjust and normalize our data.  We used normalization factors based on our robust 2010 to 2012 data sets to adjust the more limited data sets we had for 2008 and 2009.  As a result, our ratings have remained remarkably stable.

Any registered CSRHub user can see a chart that shows the corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance of the companies we track, since 2008.  In many cases, the chart will show partial ratings for a number of months, and a gradual build towards a full rating.  The consequence of a CSR problem can often be tracked visually.  For instance, see these charts for BP following the Gulf Oil spill and the effects on Tepco’s ratings of the Fukishima meltdown.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred in April of 2010.  By October, all of BP’s ratings had begun to fall.  The worst damage occurred in its Community category score—which fell from the low 60s to the low 40s.  BP’s overall score stabilized in the middle 50s by early 2011 and has remained in that area since then.

Japan was struck by a major tsunami on March 11, 2011.  Tepco’s Fukishima reactor became a worldwide center of attention in the weeks that followed.  Tepco’s environmental score took an immediate hit, followed by drops in its governance and employee scores as more details emerged of how the company had handled the event.  A number of governance changes in late 2011 and 2012 have brought that score now to a new high.

CSRHub professional level subscribers can “roll back” our system to any month in the period.  They can see which sources were available for each company in the system at any point in time.  They can also do historic benchmarks and analysis of long-term trends in corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance.

Several university researchers have already launched studies, using this newly expanded data set.  We expect their work to reveal many insights that we can share with you, as they become available.

Bahar Gidwani is a Cofounder and CEO of CSRHub. Formerly, he was the CEO of New York-based Index Stock Imagery, Inc, from 1991 through its sale in 2006. He has built and run large technology-based businesses and has experience building a multi-million visitor Web site. Bahar holds a CFA, was a partner at Kidder, Peabody & Co., and worked at McKinsey & Co. Bahar has consulted to both large companies such as Citibank, GE, and Acxiom and a number of smaller software and Web-based companies. He has an MBA (Baker Scholar) from Harvard Business School and a BS in Astronomy and Physics (magna cum laude) from Amherst College. Bahar races sailboats, plays competitive bridge, and is based in New York City.

CSRHub provides access to corporate social responsibility and sustainability ratings and information on 7,000+ companies from 135 industries in 91 countries. Managers, researchers and activists use CSRHub to benchmark company performance, learn how stakeholders evaluate company CSR practices and seek ways to change the world.

By Ewa Bialoglowska 

Setting public sustainability goals is not just an increasingly common trend for business, but has become nearly universal among leading sustainability companies. This statement comes from a Viridis Strategy Group study, “Sustainability Goals 2.0: Envisioning the Next Horizon,” which was released on March 14, 2012. The study focuses on the external goals that companies publicly commit in their CSR/sustainability reports and websites. The study used a sample of 126 companies from the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and Newsweek’s Green Rankings (see CSRHub).

Nearly 90 percent of the companies in the study were found to have public goals. On average, one company sets nine sustainability goals, with goals for carbon reduction as the most common type. Moreover, sustainability leaders are increasingly reaching beyond departmental boundaries by setting goals for their products (R&D – 25 percent), their upstream supply chains (procurement and policy – 13 percent), and their community and philanthropic engagements. In addition, the Viridis study reveals a trend for setting more ambitious, visionary, and impact-oriented goals that are not simple reduction rates. They found that 67 percent of the companies studied have succeeded in achieving their impact reduction targets.

The trend that Virdis Strategy describes in this study frames a rise in public commitments and reporting. Both of these factors are key in understanding a company’s performance and behavior around sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The more a company makes goals, and makes them public, the more we could expect third-party data sources to reflect this change. As this trend builds, it will also affect their CSRHub rating, as we rely on over 140 external data sources. Similarly, should these goals begin to transform from reduction rates to greater impact, as the Virdis study suggests, this would have ripple effects not just in an increase in reporting, but an increase in change in performance. 

Ewa Bialoglowska, Data Analyst. Originally from Poland, Ewa is currently enrolled in the MS Program in Sustainability Management at Columbia University, New York. Ewa also holds a double M.A. in International Business and Management from the UK’s University of Bradford and Poland’s Kozminsky University. She earned her B.A. in Economics from Krakow University of Economics and studied Management in Singapore Management University. Her professional experiences include working within the areas of FMCG Retail, Business Process Management, Real Estate Brokerage and NPOs, where she was involved in conducting market research and analysis on organizational strategy and business development. Being business minded and socially conscious, Ewa sees that long term well-being depends on creating a new mind-set towards sustainable value. Her goal is to help companies utilize new opportunities for competitive advantage through applying sustainability approach.