Crowdsourced Benchmarks

Responsible 100 has developed performance benchmarks on scores of social, environmental and ethical issues, working with hundreds of businesses and partner organisations such as NGOs, campaigners and civil society groups.

Irrespective of the issue – and we look at the widest range of things from modern slavery to cyber security to customer complaints and redress – we’ve learned that poor, okay, good and excellent performance can almost always be summarised as follows: 

  • Excellent – We champion this issue.
  • Good – We impact more positively than negatively.
  • Okay – We impact both positively and negatively. Or this issue does not impact us in any way. 
  • Poor – We impact more negatively than positively.

A deeper explanation of these performance levels can be found in our FAQs.

How benchmarks are developed and how to contribute

We explored hundreds of responsibility issues over the years. Currently, there are just 22 in our list. 

We felt this was an adequate number to offer something of a one-stop-shop by covering a broad range of issues. But by limiting the number of issues to 22, we keep things as manageable as possible for our participants and partners, and in managing and administering everything, as this second version of Responsible 100 soft launches and grows.

This stated, we already have a handful of additional issues we’d like to add in ASAP. There will soon be a 23rd and a 24th! Which issues are missing, in your opinion? We’d like to hear from you… 

Contact Us

We welcome suggestions for new benchmarks on new issues not yet in the list. And we welcome your suggestions on how to improve the current set that we’re already using.

You’ll notice that each of our issues pages provide similar materials, e.g.: 

  • A simple, clear introduction (30-60 words)
  • A longer explanation and exploration (a few hundred words) 
  • A few questions that respondents should be thinking about 
  • An outline of Poor, Okay, Good and Excellent performance
  • Definitions of jargon and technical terms
  • Links and further resources

What we’d like to soon add is guidance and materials to enable businesses to improve. 

Diagnosis is important and valuable, but a starting point. Once a participant has undertaken our initial steps and is clear on the priority issues it will be tackling first, it needs to know how to get from:

  • Poor to Okay
  • Okay to Good
  • Good to Excellent

Usually, expert partners don’t simply possess a deep understanding their issue, but also knowledge and experience as to how the issue impacts business, and how business impacts the issue. They offer examples as to how businesses have changed their policies and practices to impact the issue more positively, and impact it less negatively. 

Increasingly, our issues partners are interested in ways of building a positive culture around business improvement on their issues of expertise. We believe that Responsible 100 can play a useful role in helping to develop those cultures and communities.

Please reach out in regards to any of the above. Our “Contact Us” form allows you to provide a few sentences as to your issue, your expertise and your particular angle or experience. By all means provide hyperlinks to your work and any comments, feedback and questions you may have.