06.6.2024 Bahar Gidwani
We considered many names for our site—in fact we spent our first year and a half under a different name—EkoHub. We liked “Eko” — coming from the Greek word Oikos, related to economy, ecology, and “home” or social concerns. From the beginning, we believed the word “Hub” reflected our desire to be at the center of the sustainability area, providing knowledge, harmony, and consensus among the hundreds of experts judging the ESG performance of companies.
We bought the web URL for ESGHub in 2007, and considered putting “ESG” (Environment, Social, Governance) ahead of hub.
However, we chose CSR, the term used for Corporate Social Responsibility, because our mission is to help corporations become more responsible for integrating sustainability into their core values and performance. We also wanted to make sure our community understood that we were bringing many frameworks together through our consensus “Big Data” algorithm to help companies and the world move forward toward sustainability.
We considered separating our name into two parts and calling ourselves “CSR Hub”. But, we wanted to indicate that we were taking an integrative and holistic approach to sustainability, by including all types of stakeholders in our system. We debated which letters to capitalize. We felt that all parts of corporate social responsibility were equal, so we capitalized “C,” “S,” and “R.” We put our part—the “Hub”—with only an initial capital, so that people wouldn’t think our name rhymes with “shrub!”
As my mom said about one of our cats, she’d answer to any name, as long she got fed! We’ll respond even if you call us EkoHub, ESGHub, or CSR Hub…but our formal name of CSRHub has served us well, over the past 16 years!
Bahar Gidwani is CTO 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. He plays bridge, races sailboats, and is based in New York City.
About CSRHub
CSRHub offers the most comprehensive global set of Consensus ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) ratings, information, and tools. CSRHub’s business intelligence system measures the ESG business impact that drives corporate and investor sustainability decisions. Founded in 2007, CSRHub covers 55,000 public and private companies, and provides ESG performance scores on over 35,000 companies from 135 industries in 210 countries. Our Big Data platform uses algorithms to aggregate, normalize and weight ESG metrics from 933 sources to produce a strong consensus signal on corporate sustainability performance.
