As Francis Bacon said, scientia potentas est, “In Knowledge is Power.” CSRHUB gives our users the information they need to evaluate corporate social values and sustainability. Once armed with ratings based on their own values, users can take action to both change their behavior and to change the world.
Today companies may provide consumers information on their environmental, employee, community and governance actions and performance. But for the most part, this data is limited, difficult to access, very expensive or doesn’t exist. Of the Fortune 1000, about 70% talk about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on their Web site, but only an estimated 27% provide a formal CSR report.
The percentage of smaller companies reporting their CSR behavior is even lower. Fortunately, dedicated activist groups, Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) - Environment, Social, Governance (ESG) research firms, publishers, bloggers, and government agencies review and analyze the behavior of thousands of companies. The most comprehensive data comes from the SRI firms. Their information is used primarily by socially-oriented investment managers and mutual funds. Ordinary consumers cannot afford to purchase their research and have not had a framework they could use to combine the information from these sources into a single consistent rating system.
CSRHUB gives consumers access to more than 80 sources of CSR information. The largest contribution of data comes from aggregating five of the eight leading SRI research firms. The CSRHUB database also aggregates information from publishers, NGOs, and three government agencies. Using a proprietary system for mapping and normalizing this broad range of information, CSRHUB provides consistent ratings on over 5,000 companies in North America, Europe and Asia.
It is important to note that CSRHUB does not provide the underlying ratings and only serves as a hub. While we have aggregated some of the best, most objective corporate responsibility ratings in the world, we know that each member of our community of users will have his or her own view on CSR performance. Therefore, we allow each of our users to adjust the priority for the various categories of CSR. We also allow users to indicate that certain “Special Issues” such as involvement in Burma, animal testing, or nuclear power are important.
By creating this personal profile, a CSRHUB user can adjust our ratings to match his or her own preferences and beliefs. Our users can share their value profiles with others and search for groups of users who share their beliefs. Non-governmental groups (NGOs) may use CSRHUB to organize and communicate their views and engage their members in taking action to improve the world.
Our search system allows CSRHUB users to find and compare the ratings of companies in different industries and countries. Both consumers and businesspeople can use this information to make economic decisions, look for employees or jobs, organize buycotts and boycotts, and make purchasing or supply chain decisions.
Please see our Ratings Methodology for more details on how we generate our ratings and our Data Schema for more details on how we aggregate data.
Feedback and Future Development
Our site is still under development. We apologize for any bugs you may encounter. We welcome your reactions, suggestions, and questions. We would also appreciate referrals to additional sources of information for our database. In our next version, we plan to incorporate user-sourced opinions into our ratings schema. We will also provide an opportunity for companies to contribute their reaction to our ratings. We expect to launch a Beta version of the site soon that will offer our users more detailed information on our ratings.
Advertising
As part of our business model we provide advertising that is screened using CSRHUB ratings. Our custom ad-filtering system ensures that our users only see ads from companies whose social values match their own value. We also enable nonprofit, social network and activist organizations to carry advertising that is consistent with their values.
Why We Founded CSRHUB
Co-founders Cynthia Figge, Bahar Gidwani, and Stephen Filler share a passion for business as an agent of positive social change. We believe that providing these corporate social ratings will increase the transparency of CSR progress and performance, and more openly encourage critical discussions of how companies treat their employees, impact the environment, adjust their carbon footprint, act in their community, provide innovative products and services for sustainable development, and govern themselves. We hope that this site is part of a broad change that relates company marketplace performance to their environmental, social and governance performance. You can read more about our team, here.
Disclosure
There are currently almost no mandatory Sustainability reporting regulations. The reporting requirements for corporate governance issues vary by jurisdiction, as do regulations on labor and community issues. We assume that our rating sources are only using publicly-disclosed information in their evaluations of the CSR performance of the companies they cover and that they have taken reasonable steps to ensure that their information is accurate. However, it is possible that our ratings may contain information that has been improperly disclosed or that is inaccurate.
We strongly advise our users not to use our data as the basis for any investment decisions. We also advise against using our data for any legal or regulatory action. Please inform us at support@csrhub.com if you find any information on our site that you believe is inaccurate. You may also wish to obtain additional information from the sources we used to form our rating or from the company we are rating, before taking any social action for or against a company.
