FAQs
Responsible 100 is a tool and improvement process for businesses of all sizes and sectors. It is also for the NGOs, campaign groups and other civil society organisations which challenge and support business.
It is a unique and powerful new way for businesses to be responsible, and for experts and other stakeholders to support and incentivise businesses to fully invest themselves into 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 help companies to operate as responsibly as they possibly can, bespoke to their own particular needs and circumstances.
Being in business has always been tough and it always will be. Being responsible and sustainable at the same time is harder still. But it is necessary. We propose a powerful new way to approach responsibility. We can help any business, today, no matter its starting point.
Responsible 100 will help you work out what to stop doing, and what to start doing instead, across all the responsibility issues that impact your business. This will benefit your business, and everyone else.
It is useful to think about Responsible 100 in terms of four distinct user groups: the participating business and organisations, the expert partners, the individual users of our website and logo, and the team itself who are the convenors and administrators.
Participant businesses and organisations: Participating organisations undertake the various steps in our process scoring their performance on the various responsibility issues we explore, and detailing their policies, practices and positions via their written stories.
Expert partners: Our partners range from large NGOs and campaign groups, to specialist consultancies, to individual experts. What they each have in common is genuine expertise on the responsibility issue on which they partner, and a desire to help all businesses improve their performance and impacts in respect of that issue. Partners help define, develop and improve our benchmarks. In many cases they work directly with the participating businesses and organisations to help them improve their performance. In partnering with us we enable experts to extend their sphere of influence and help drive positive change for businesses and communities alike.
Individual users: Individual users are the people who care about the social, environmental and ethical issues we explore and use the information businesses provide via Responsible 100’s steps and process. They are the people who buy from, work for and invest in different businesses, and who wish to use their power and influence as consumers, employees and investors to reward the most responsible businesses, at the expense of the laggards and the most irresponsible ones. Currently, this is the group that is most poorly served by Responsible 100 but features and functions planned for the future will change that, see FAQ What additional functionality will Responsible 100 provide its users in the future?
Responsible 100: Responsible 100 is run by a small for-profit business based in London, UK. We’ve been going since 2002 and have always aspired to help businesses do real, credible, worthwhile responsibility, and to avoid the greenwash, posturing and theatre. Responsible 100 was conceived in 2012 and was the product of years of prototyping and experimentation. It ran successfully in its first incarnation to 2018 until it was essentially captured by its largest clients. This second incarnation has been planned since 2020 and we are now pretty much soft launch ready. See FAQ Who is behind Responsible 100?
Key features businesses should consider:
- An entirely unique and practical approach
- No lengthy application process or other barriers to join
- Gaining help today, no matter your starting point
- Go at your own pace
- Coaching from experts and support from peers
- Help and support tailored to your particular challenges and circumstances
- Making responsibility work a shared, team endeavour
- Bullet proof credibility and trustworthiness by design
- Achieving optimal responsibility: doing nothing short of all you can to maximise your responsibility performance as a driver of your profitability and commercial success
- Joining a highly scalable innovation with the potential to create change at the systems level
Subject to new EU laws and regulations, by late 2025 or early 2026, participant businesses and organisations will be able to display one or more of our badges on their websites, packaging, email signatures and other such marketing materials, if they have met the minimum requirements to do so.
The minimum requirement to display the Responsible 100 badge will be that a business has published and shared a set number of stories. Our steps and process are designed to help businesses compile complete, accurate and verifiable stories that describe their policies and practices in respect of the responsibility issues we explore.
The minimum requirement to display the Responsible 100 badge may be that a business has published and shared 5 stories or 10 stories. Minimum requirements will become more demanding as Responsible 100 grows.
Going through our process will enable you to make a number of powerful claims about your business.
These claims reflect the work you will be doing alongside other participants. They also reflect key concepts and aspirations that underpin Responsible 100 and its vision and model, which your participation will help further test and refine.
Six of the most important concepts – and accompanying claims – can be found on the homepage. Here are some more. Which appeals to you the most?
Practise Responsibility As A Skill
Practise makes perfect, so the saying goes. We’re taken with the concept of practising responsibility as a skill. We mean getting better at it, more experienced and confident, such that you do more, go further and become ever-bolder in your future responsibility practices and ambitions. The more practised you become, the more you can create and innovate to both benefit your business and serve the public good, further driving your competitive advantages and commercial success.
Responsible Fiduciary Duty
The fiduciary duty of business executives is widely understood to be a duty to maximise financial returns to the business’s owners. We suggest that execs fail in that duty by engaging in responsibility undertakings that are unlikely to improve the company’s commercial success. If it is, or seems to be, responsibility theatre undertaken for PR purposes, that’s bad business. Greenwashing is now increasingly likely to fail as a strategy, waste money, make the business less trusted not more, and depress the share price. If company executives fail to align responsibility with business strategy and goals, they must be falling short of their fiduciary duty.
We’re Transparent & Accountable
We encourage and incentivise transparency and accountability as the final, critical step for businesses going through our process. We’ve learnt that openness and honesty as to the challenges and opportunities presented by the range of social, environmental and ethical issues we explore is powerful. Indeed it is the best possible course for businesses that wish to impact wider society, nature and future generations as positively as they can.
Openness & Honesty Engenders Trust
It is unrealistic and unhelpful to expect that any business can be perfect. But reasonable and logical to expect them to explain and justify all the things they do that impact others. All companies must make trade offs, all of the time, to balance their pursuit of profit with the interests of people, planet and future generations. We believe that opening up and honestly explaining these trade offs is an excellent means of earning the critical stakeholder trust and buy-in, on which long term business success depends.
We’re All In This Together
We’re all in this together. Whether or not you feel like a hostage in a failing system, or think everything is working out just fine at the moment, our world remains unquestionably volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous and ever-changing. Accepting and respecting alternative views feels logical, necessary and pragmatic….
Pick A Side
…. yet if we accept that business as usual is both appalling and unnecessary, and competing in a race to the top stimulates all the best bits of business, then surely it is time to pick a side?!
Responsible 100 is designed to be ungameable.
We provide a minimum of 10 hours of consultancy support time to every participating business and organisation. Our model is engineered to incentivise businesses to submit a minimum amount of information into our digital platform each month.
As we support your business in doing the work to progress through our steps, we get to know one another well and develop a strong relationship. We assess the scores and stories you submit and we discuss and debate those with you. We help you to develop and complete your stories and we validate your scores. We will also suggest ways in which you can improve your performance on all the issues we explore.
Businesses are not obliged to share what they submit. However, to be valuable to others, their stories must be shared with and seen by other businesses and by partner organisations. As such, sharing is preferred and incentivised with our pricing.
Whether a business chooses to share its information with other participants or partners or not, it must always guarantee its stories as complete, accurate and verifiable, and that they will be maintained as such at all times. This is a nonnegotiable requirement to approve and sign off on answers and scores.
Every 3 months, completed and shared stories are automatically reopened and returned to the ‘In Progress’ status. The business may then re-submit it unchanged if it is still a complete, accurate and verifiable story. If not, if its policies and practices have changed, or if exogenous factors (laws, regulations, norms, technology, etc) have changed such that the story is no longer complete, accurate or verifiable, it must be updated before resubmission.
We anticipate that most participating organisations will make most of their stories available to one another and, in time, also available for public scrutiny, comment and rating, as and when our digital Library offers this functionality.
Ultimately, the test of participation will be that businesses can explain and justify what they do across all the issues we explore. We believe that this is the most challenging and most valuable test of business responsibility ever devised.
We provide new logins to the Responsibility Indicator digital tool to new clients and potential client companies all the time. In the first half of 2025, these early adopter companies have enabled us to make this second iteration of the Responsible 100 initiative “soft launch-ready”, and we are enormously grateful to them.
While we are not currently operating a wait list, we do prioritise new businesses on the basis of their investment in our “get started” steps. That is, we simply ask that you score your company’s performance on at least two and preferably more responsibility issues. To do this, click Get started, select one of the three issues there, and submit your accompanying story.
Please provide thoughtful draft stories and take time to explain why you consider your performance to be at your chosen level. Nothing you submit will be shared or published anywhere, this is between you and Responsible 100 only.
When you submit, our team is notified and will review your submission and respond within two working days, and usually within an hour or two. Once we’ve had a conversation to discuss your responses, we will provide you a login to the Responsibility Indicator dashboard.
We charge a flat fee of £1,000 and supply from 10-15 consultancy support hours over a ten-month period as explained in our model.
Current initial engagement starts with an agreement that your business will undertake a certain amount of work every month for 10 consecutive months. One hour of consultancy support time is allocated every month from us to you.
Should a business wish to do more work sooner, this is welcomed. Those 10 hours of consultancy support can be used much sooner. Working faster is incentivised and may result in the award of additional consultancy support hours.
Once your consultancy support hours are used up, you may purchase more, and if you have received adequate value and are able to, then we hope and expect that you will. Even if you don’t, you will retain access to the Responsible 100 Responsibility Indicator dashboard and our digital Library.
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 around 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.
In our second incarnation, while we still score as either Poor, Okay, Good or Excellent, we’ve made changes to when scoring happens, by whom, and who validates and how, etc.
Previously, we created detailed benchmarks that included scores and sometimes hundreds of policy and practice examples, and we helped businesses place themselves on those scales. Now, our benchmarks are co-created with our community of businesses, partners, and experts. We collectively define what Poor, Okay, Good and Excellent performances look like in practice. Your ongoing contributions continue to shape these standards for everyone. Routinely businesses misjudge themselves on their performance, more commonly underestimating themselves rather than overestimating how well they perform.
Fine, valuable benchmarks continue to emerge despite the evolutions in how we do things.
Most campaign groups focus on a specific responsibility issue. They often seek out and highlight examples of poor practices, and valuably serve society in doing so. 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 invite every participant to share their experiences and insights. These stories are vital for uncovering new ways to achieve Good and Excellent performance and for helping others learn from real-world challenges and successes.
We require a few things that such participant businesses and 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 participants and 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 business needs to do, or not do, to meet this level?
Excellent is a special case because such performance levels may not 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, participant businesses and 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.
Benefits of Partnership are listed here.
We explore an incredibly diverse range of issues. Those that have huge ethical implications, such as Executive Pay and Rights Of Indigenous Peoples, and those that have more operational or business hygiene issues, such as Cyber Security. Some, like for example Causes & Campaigns, relate very closely to the values, beliefs and culture of a business. As such, our 22 issues present utterly different risks and opportunities to companies. Further, they also impact in entirely asymmetric ways according to company size, sector and circumstances.
Nonetheless, over the years, hundreds of real-life examples and shared stories have helped us refine what Poor, Okay, Good, and Excellent mean in practice.
For performance to be Excellent, the issue is usually of fundamental importance to the business, and likely to be relevant to its raison d’être and purpose as an organisation. The business will be keenly focused on implementing the maximum number of positive impact practices and activities, and minimising the number of negative impact practices relating to the issue. It will be net-positive in its overall impact.
The business will very likely measure, set targets, monitor and report on progress for ongoing improvement and innovation, or lack of it. Performing better than peers or comparable businesses will likely be very important.
Excellence on the issue is usually tied to overall business strategy. The business will likely be communicating the importance of the issue to other stakeholders, using multiple means and channels to do so. It will be demonstrating a holistic approach to the issue, and seeking support and contribution to best practices from partners and 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.
For performance to be Good, the issue will be important to the business and it will pursue a number of best practices. It will be demonstrating a considered and joined up approach, adopting as many positive impact practices, and ceasing as many negative impact practices, as far and wide as possible. This stated, it is likely to be under some limitations or constraints to doing more, but will likely be open about this and provide explanation and context.
The company may not perform much better than net-neutrality in its overall impacts: there will be plenty of positive impacts, but they may be largely offset by various negative impact practices that the business has yet to work out how to cease and prevent, although it will tirelessly seek to.
Good means regularly communicating the importance of the issue to other stakeholders, and doing solid work on measurement, target setting, monitoring and reporting on progress.
For performance to be Okay, the business will recognise that the issue is important and may pursue a number of best or at least laudable practices, but will only be doing so on an ad hoc basis. Further, while the business may do some things to positively impact the issue, it is still doing things that result in negative impacts and will be net-negative in its overall impacts.
It may be evaluating if and how to adopt policies and practices to improve. It may be making some effort to alleviate, mitigate or remediate the negative impacts it is responsible for. The business may wish to perform better but be prevented from making the issue a higher priority due to barriers to improvement such as cost, budget considerations and opportunity costs. In contrast to Poor, an Okay business is usually open about the importance of the issue to society and/or the environment and open to the idea of using its influence to encourage openness, debate and the adoption of better and best practices generally.
Okay is a special case in that it is the default performance assigned when a business demonstrates that an issue is neither relevant nor material to its operations and outside of all its spheres of concern or influence. Okay is the default performance assigned under such circumstances given assigning Poor, Good or Excellent would be illogical when an issue has no relevance or materiality to a business.
Poor performance usually means that the business is net-negative in its overall impacts yet has no plans to change. The business will make no valid attempt to alleviate, mitigate nor remediate its negative impacts.
It is likely that the company’s underlying business model is dependent on continuing policies and practices that negatively impact society and/or the environment. The business may refuse to accept responsibility for what it does and fail to demonstrate 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 likely 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 wisdom and best practices.
Or a business can be Poor because it is significantly net-negative in its overall impacts through accident, oversight, misfortune or bad luck, and/or despite its best efforts not to be. Such Poor performance may be acknowledged and accepted. It may also include the assumption of full responsibility for implementing improvements as soon as possible, and a commitment to openness, honesty and accountability in regards to how it fares in its efforts to improve.
Currently, most participant businesses share their information (‘stories’) and performance scores with our expert partners and other participant businesses in our digital Library. Soon, they’ll also be able to share their information with the public at large, thus opening up the possibility of two further powerful claims.
Super Users will be able to offer constructive feedback and support to Responsible 100 participants for free. This will not only help others to become more responsible and improve their impact, but also support Super Users providing them with greater credibility.
The library will play a central role on the Responsible 100 website, as the shared stories and experiences are the essence of the organisation. The stories will help others to gain knowledge and better benchmark their own organisations.
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 24 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, and an adviser to SMEs on financing, budgeting, strategy and general management issues. He was President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) for the year to June 2025. He remains a Member of ICAEW Council, a Member of ICAEW’s Technical Strategy Board, and previously chaired the ICAEW’s Ethics Standards Committee. View Malcolm’s profile on LinkedIn.
Elias Eichhorn, Business Development Intern
Elias is studying Environmental Studies and Business at Washington and Lee University in USA. He aspires to a career in corporate sustainability and has particular responsibility for enhancing Responsible 100’s client engagement. View Elias’s profile on LinkedIn.
Responsible 100 dates back to 2012 and was the product of several forerunning initiatives prior. Each of the preceding initiatives offered businesses and partner organisations to opportunity to collaborate on a framework and methodology for demonstrating transparency and accountability on a range of responsibility issues. We’ve long regarded this as the ultimate test of true business responsibility and trustworthiness.
Towards the end of 2012, performance scores were added to the written accounts that businesses provided: 10 for Poor, 40 for Okay, 70 for Good and 100 for Excellent. A business was awarded an overall ‘Responsible 100 score’, out of 100, as the average of its performance scores gained on each of the issue benchmarks it assessed against. Scores tended to range from 60 to 90. However, many businesses quickly became more interested in improving their Responsible 100 score, rather than investing in the actual work: improving their policies and practices as far, wide and rapidly as possible. This method of scoring was discontinued as a result, but the name stuck.
Responsible 100 ran in its first incarnation from 2012 to 2019 before being discontinued. A second incarnation has been under development since 2020 and soft launched in 2025. The number 100 takes on a new significance this time around given that the number of tokens a participant business amasses is expressed as an average of the total number of minted tokens. Quite how this impacts the brand or name remains to be seen, however.