About Us
If you have a question for Responsible 100 that is not covered by this current version of our frequently asked questions, or FAQs, please submit it here and we’ll be glad to answer.
What is Responsible 100?
Responsible 100 is a business tool and improvement process. It is an entirely unique and powerful new way for businesses to be responsible, and for experts and campaign groups to support and incentivise businesses to fully invest in this work. Responsible 100 enables businesses to balance their own economic interests with the interests of nature, society and a fair, livable, sustainable future. We enable companies to operate as responsibly as they possibly can, bespoke to their own particular needs and circumstances.
What are Responsible 100’s key differentiating features and benefits
Key features include:
How does Responsible 100 create and share value?
Our model enables us to coordinate work with many businesses and many partner organisations, at once. This, and the accumulation and intelligent uses of business responsibility data, underpin the value we create.
A key concept is that we can help businesses improve, and the work we do will directly benefit those clients we do it with. Yet, crucially, at the same time, this work will also benefit all the other participants in the initiative too, businesses and partners alike. The information that businesses share enables us to improve our benchmarks.
This curated set of benchmarks for each of the important issues we explore, which become better informed by capturing what is happening in the real world all the time, constitutes a formidable resource. From this, we anticipate generating a range of shared benefits for our community in support of our mission.
How and why are performance benchmarks used?
Benchmarking performance on a wide range of responsibility and sustainability issues, and using the results to inform and empower businesses, is at the heart of what Responsible 100 does.
Over the years, we have explored thousands of different real life policy and practice examples, working with 700-800 different businesses and organisations. It was 2012 when we first experimented with ascribing different scores to the policies and practices we helped to uncover.
Although who and when and how scores are attributed and validated continues to evolve, we still score as either Poor, Okay, Good or Excellent, using those words in their normal, everyday sense.
How is benchmarking used to support businesses to improve?
We support businesses of all sizes and sectors in estimating how they perform, as either Poor, Okay, Good or Excellent, quickly and painlessly. We do this early on in our work engagements because it provides an essential starting point.
We then apply different lenses on the results. We look at a range of factors that inform next steps and improvement plans. Issue by issue, we’ll explore with you things such as:
Are there any patterns or similarities within the benchmarks, across the issues?
There are great differences between the issues we explore. For example, consider Causes & Campaigns, Recycling & Waste, Reducing Inequality, Executive Pay, Rights Of Indigenous Peoples, Customer Complaints, and Cyber Security – each of these presents utterly different risks and opportunities to companies. Further, they also impact in entirely asymmetric ways according to company size and sector.
Nonetheless, there are common themes between the four performance standards we use. Here is a flavour across the four standards:
Excellent: The issue is of fundamental importance to the business, and likely to be relevant to its raison d’être and purpose as an organisation. The business is keenly focused on implementing the maximum number of positive impact practices and activities, and minimising the number of negative impact practices. It is net-positive in its overall impacts. It very likely measures, sets targets, monitors and reports on progress, or lack of it. Performing better than peers or comparable businesses is important. Excellence on the issue is often relevant to, and tied to, overall business strategy. The business communicates the importance of the issue to other stakeholders, using multiple means and channels to do so. It demonstrates a holistic approach seeking support and contribution to best practices from third parties up and down its value chains. The business likely campaigns on the issue. It promotes best practices in as many ways as possible.
Good: The issue is important to the business and it pursues a number of best practices. It demonstrates a considered and joined up approach adopting as many positive impact practices, and ceasing any negative impact practices, as far and wide as possible. Thai stated, it is likely to be under some limitations or constraints to doing more, but is open about this and provides explanation and context. The company is likely net-neutral in its overall impacts. It regularly communicates the importance of the issue to other stakeholders. It is likely to do some work on measurement, target setting, monitoring and reporting on progress.
Okay: The business recognises that the issue is important and may pursue a number of best or at least laudable practices, but only on an ad hoc basis. Further, while the business may do some things to positively impact the issue, it is still doing things which result in negative impacts. It is likely net-negative in its overall impacts. It may be evaluating if and how to adopt policies and practices to improve. It likely makes some attempts to alleviate, mitigate or remediate its negative impacts. The business would be likely to make the issue a higher priority but is unable to due to barriers to improvement such as cost, budget considerations and opportunity costs. The business is open about the importance of the issue to society and/or the environment and is prepared to use its influence to encourage openness, debate and the adoption of better and bests practices generally. Or the business explains how the issue is neither relevant nor material to its operations and outside of all its spheres of influence and thus defaults to Okay, as Poor, Good and Excellent would all be infeasible and illogical under such circumstances.
Poor: The business is net-negative in its overall impacts yet has no plans to change. The business makes no attempt to alleviate, mitigate nor remediate its negative impacts. The company’s underlying business model may rely on continued net-negative practices, which in turn may depend on refusing to accept responsibility for what it does or demonstrate any honesty, transparency or accountability on the issue. The business may ignore credible evidence regarding the negative impacts of its activities and practices. The business is neither open nor honest about the importance of the issue to society and/or the environment. The business may use its influence to encourage poor practices generally. It may sponsor and champion denial and other ways to cast doubt on received scientific knowledge, received wisdoms and best practices. Or the business is net-negative in its overall impacts through accident, oversight, misfortune or bad luck, and/or despite its best efforts not to be, but admits this and takes full responsibility for implementing improvements as soon as possible, and will be open, honest and accountable in regards to how it fares on an ongoing basis.
What are the benefits to partner organisations in co-creating benchmarks?
Most campaign groups focus on a specific responsibility issue. They often seek out and highlight examples of poor practices, and valuably serve society in so doing. Larger NGOs do the same, often working on a range of different or related responsibility issues. All such organisations are welcome to join Responsible 100.
We require a few things that such expert organisations may not have considered that much previously. That is, once Poor practice is identified, what practical and pragmatic changes might then be expected of businesses that are willing and able to improve? Often, simply stopping the Poor things they do, overnight, is so damaging to their business model that they dismiss doing so out of hand.
As such, we ask our partners to consider Okay policies and practices. What are the things a company must start doing, and the things it should stop doing, that are achievable to it, to improve from Poor to Okay? The more reasonable and achievable those things, then the greater the pressure on businesses to make those changes.
Obviously we don’t want to stop there. So, likewise, we’re keen to know how a business could improve from Okay to Good performance. What does Good look like? What are the things a businesses needs to do, or not do, to meet this level?
Excellent is a special case because such performance levels may not actually exist in the real world, or at least not yet. Or, if they do, these are only in rare and exceptional cases. It may be that Excellent performance is imagined and aspired to. This also depends very much on the issue. Suffice it to say, in the Responsible 100 era, partner organisations have the opportunity to imagine tangible standards of Excellent performance that companies can strive for, issue by issue, and inspire and support them in achieving it.
Is there a badge to display?
The badge is coming soon.
The minimum requirement to display it will be that a business has disclosed practices and scored performance on a specified number of issues. Minimum requirements will become more demanding as Responsible 100 grows.
Businesses and organisations participating in Responsible 100 will be able to display the badge on their websites, packaging, email signatures and other such marketing materials, if they have met the minimum requirements to do so.
What are the costs?
Responsible 100 provides businesses with support throughout the steps to score, develop your written accounts and make plans for improving. Our costs are based on support hours provided – and are discounted as you provide more information (stories) to demonstrate evidence of your performance in the different areas of responsibility.
| Stories shared or submitted on 1 to 21 issues | Bronze | Silver | Gold |
| Support hours provided | 0 | 5 | 12 |
| Hourly rate | n/a | £200 | £166 |
| Total fee | £0 | £1,000 | £2,000 |
| Stories shared or submitted on all 22 issues | Bronze | Silver | Gold |
| Support hours provided | 2 | 10 | 24 |
| Hourly rate | n/a | £100 | £84 |
| Total fee | £0 | £1,000 | £2,000 |
Who is behind Responsible 100?
Responsible 100 is delivered by Profit Through Ethics Ltd an independent, for-profit, impact business based in London, UK.
Michael Solomon, Director
Michael devised the Responsible 100 concept in 2012 having worked on various forerunning initiatives prior. He has over 23 years of experience in innovation and entrepreneurship in responsible business. View Michael’s profile on LinkedIn.
Malcolm Bacchus, Virtual Finance Director
Malcolm is a Chartered Accountant, a company director, an adviser to SMEs on financing, budgeting, strategy and general management issues, and currently the President of the ICAEW. View Malcolm’s profile on LinkedIn.