What is CSRHUB? CSRHUB is a free website and tool that provides social, environmental, community and governance ratings on most major companies in North America, Europe and Asia. We are the first company to combine data from five of the premier socially responsible investment (SRI) analysis firms (also known as Environment, Social, Governance - ESG), and over 120 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), government agencies, news feeds, social networking groups, smaller for-profit organizations, and publishers. Our proprietary tools combine more than two million pieces of data on sustainability and CSR performance into a consistent set of ratings. We then allow users to personalize these ratings, share them, and add their own views on companies. Our site enables users to learn about and compare company sustainability and CSR behavior. While there is no charge for much of our ratings information, we provide additional information to fee-paying subscribers and sell custom reports as well.
Who started CSRHUB? Our three co-founders are Cynthia Figge, Bahar Gidwani, and Stephen Filler. We have worked for more than three years on this project. Cynthia Figge, President and COO, cofounded one of the first consultancies integrating sustainability and corporate strategy in 1996, and brings many years of experience tracking corporate responsibility. Bahar Gidwani, CEO, previously CEO of Index Stock Imagery, has built and run Web-based and technology-based businesses. Co-founder and Advisor Stephen Filler is an attorney who specializes in intellectual property and business law, and is currently Director of Business Development for a solar energy company. Cynthia and Bahar both hold Harvard MBAs and Bahar is also a CFA.
What is CSRHUB’s goal and purpose? There has been no easy way for consumers and businesses to discover how companies perform and compare on sustainability and CSR issues. This makes it hard for people to make socially responsible decisions about what to buy, where to work, whom to do business with, and which companies to support or not support. CSRHUB brings leading information about corporate social performance into one place so businesses, NGOs, online publications, social networking sites, and individuals can use CSRHUB’s information to understand, share, discuss, and track the CSR and sustainability performance of companies.
What is the CSRHUB schema? CSRHUB overall ratings are based on four categories: Environment, Employees, Community, and Governance categories. Each category has three subcategories. Environment – Environmental Policy and Reporting, Energy and Climate Change, Resource Management; Employees: Diversity and Labor Rights, Compensation and Benefits, Training Health and Safety; Community – Community Development and Philanthropy, Human Rights and Supply Chain, Product; Governance – Leadership Ethics, Board, Transparency and Reporting. Review www.csrhub.com/content/csrhub-data-schema for more information.
How are ratings calculated? CSRHUB takes information from its data sources and transforms it into a 0 to 100 scale. We then weight the data sources, aggregate their scores, and then adjust them so that they fit together smoothly.
What is better, a higher or lower rating? CSRHUB takes information from its data sources and transforms it into a 0 to 100 scale. The higher the rating the better, with 100 as the best rating.
Why can I only lock two of my profile categories? The four primary categories comprise one hundred percent of a company’s rating, so the total of your choices cannot exceed the maximum value of 12. You can set the value for the two categories that are most important to you, lock them, and then adjust the remaining two values within the pre-set limit.
How does my profile affect my scores? When you make one of the four categories of environment, employees, community and governance more important, you increase the effect of that category’s scores on the overall scores you see. The base category scores remain the same, but your personal overall score for each company increases or decreases. Setting special issues will also affect your scores. (See below.) You can read more about our schema on this page. Watch a brief video on this topic at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgys61GHqRo.
How do I use the logic function in advanced search? The logic function enables users to specify their preferences. To search for companies with an exact score only (e.g. 65), use “=”. If you’d like to find companies with a specific or higher rating, use “>=” (e.g. 65 and up) and for a specific rating or lower “<=” (e.g. 65 and lower). “<” and “>” will exclude the value you enter and only give you lower and higher values (e.g. 64 and lower or 66 and higher). Watch a brief video on this topic at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9yqIVFQCUk.
What are special issues? Some issues don’t fall into our four category structure. For instance, whether or not a company tests its products on animals, does business in Burma, or is a good place for women to work may not be directly covered by ratings on a company’s governance, labor relations, etc. Special issues are things you feel especially strongly about. You can choose to make their presence in a company a positive thing (e.g., you could upgrade companies that support unions), a negative thing (e.g., you could downgrade the ratings of companies that are against the NRA), or drop the ratings entirely for those companies who are involved in an area you feel strongly about. If you choose “exclude” for a special issue, a company that has this issue will show no rating. It will also be taken out of the ratings for its geography and industry. This reflects the fact that some of our users feel so strongly about special issues that they are uncomfortable with seeing any rating for these companies. Watch a brief video on this topic at www.youtube.com/watch?v=i37oB7TmQic.
What is a Saved Screen? A saved screen saves your search logic and results.
How do I save a Screen? After you have applied your search logic, you may “Save or Load a Search Screen”. Watch a brief video on this topic at www.youtube.com/watch?v=tde4-Ze85F8.
Does a Saved Screen retain my search list results? Saving a screen saves the logic of the search. If the data base changes, the results will change, but the saved search process stays the same. You can set up whatever you want to see and then run the same query consistently, each time.
What are the benefits of registering on CSRHUB? If you register, you can create your own personal profile. Or, you can “borrow” profiles from other people—either by having them send their profile to you or by looking for interesting profiles using our profile search feature. Registered users can save an unlimited number of profiles—and can switch back and forth freely between them. Registered users can also save lists of companies—and can share these lists with others. You also need to be registered before you can control which ads you see on the site and before you can post comments on the site’s forums. Once you are registered, you can change the layout of your company lists. You can also save searches—a big help, if you are regularly monitoring a certain area.
What are the benefits of subscribing to CSRHUB? Subscribers get to see more information on each company in our database. In particular, they can see twelve subcategory ratings (instead of four category ratings). This allows our subscribers to better judge the behavior of companies they are interested in and to compare that behavior in more detail to the behavior of all companies in an industry or particular geography. For more informaton, please review our Products page at www.csrhub.com/content/our-products.
Can I get more information on a company I am interested in? You can get more information by subscribing to CSRHUB. If you want even more information than is available to subscribers, you may want to consider buying a special report on a company from one of our data sources.
Your company names are sometimes different from what I expected. Why? We try to use the official name for each company. We then add all of the unofficial names, common names, and so on, to our system. Unfortunately, this is not a simple process and companies may change their name or merge with another company. Plus, we get our basic data from a variety of sources, and some of these sources abbreviate aggressively, remove punctuation, or force names into all caps or all lower case. Finally, certain languages have letters that don’t translate well into English (our base language). Be patient with us and send your suggestions on how to correct company names to support@csrhub.com. We’ll research your input and try to update our database.
Are ratings evenly distributed? No. The average company rating is typically about 50. That is because in general, companies have a ways to go to become sustainable and socially responsible. You can read more about how we calculate ratings on our Methodology page found at www.csrhub.com/content/csrhub-ratings-methodology.
How is the default profile set? The CSRHUB default profile is equal to the average profile setting for all of our registered users. While this is a reasonable estimate of our average user's viewpoint, it does not capture the broad range of views of our users or the "clumps" and clusters of profile settings that we observe occur. Two of those clumps are illustrated in the "Eco-oriented" and "Community-oriented" defaults that are also shown for all users.
Why should I create my own profile? Your profile reflects your view of the world. When you review company ratings using your own profile, you are seeing the relative social performance of companies from your own perspective. Once you have a profile, you can share it with your friends. They can then better understand your view of the world and (if they are CSRHUB members) understand why your view of company social performance is different from theirs.
How can I see what other people’s profiles look like? If someone sends you their profile, you can click on the profile link and see their profile settings. You can also search for profiles. When you find one you are interested in, click on the link and see the settings. You can also accept/use a profile and see the settings in the top left profile status box that is on every page of the site.
Do the organizations I belong to support CSRHUB? A large number of organizations plan to support CSRHUB. Do a profile search for your organization’s name, and see if it appears on the search results list. If it does not, please ask the head of your organization to contact us at partners@csrhub.com. We will respond with details on our partnership program. An organization that does not want to join us as a partner can still create a “group profile” for its members. However, it will not have the ability to establish and maintain a forum for its members.
What do I do if I see information that is outdated or wrong? Email us at data@csrhub.com. We will research your comment and try to fix the problem.
Why are some companies missing information on one of the four categories? Although we have more than 125 data sources and almost five million pieces of data, we don’t have every piece of data on every company. We report the information we have. Where we are missing details, we leave the information blank. This can sometimes distort the rating for a company.
Can I add a Special Issue that concerns me? Yes. However, we need to have sources for the data AND a number of members who are interested in the issue. Start by sending an email to specialissue@csrhub.com. Include your reasons for wanting to add the issue and links to any sources of information that you know of, on the issue. We will review this data and post your proposal on a special page in our forum. Based on the comments we receive (feel free to lobby!), we will periodically add (and drop) special issues from our list.
How can I help CSRHUB? You can help in many ways. You can let us know what you think about the site, how you are using it, what we can improve, and specific concerns with the data.
Why are some companies missing from CSRHUB? CSRHUB mostly covers publicly-traded companies. This is because the kind of information we require to create our ratings is only provided by public companies. We plan to expand to cover private companies, government organizations, and not-for-profits.
How does CSRHUB handle multi-nationals? Which country are they considered to belong to? In general, we try to assign multi-nationals to the country in which their headquarter is located. Some companies maintain two or more head offices in different countries. In these cases, we try to use the office location that was first established.
How does CSRHUB handle companies that use flag of convenience countries as their domicile? Certain countries have tax and other regulations that make them attractive headquarter locations. In general, we assign companies to their official legal location.
What can I do with CSRHUB’s data? Data can be used to make socially responsible decisions about what to buy, where to work, whom to do business with, and which companies to support or not support. When you joined our site, you agreed to our terms of use. Please take another look at them, if you need additional guidance on this subject. They are at http://www.csrhub.com/legal.
Should I use CSRHUB data for making investment decisions?We built CSRHUB to give access to sustainability data to corporate managers, researchers, activists, and those involved in non-governmental organizations. Investors have other, better options for obtaining the data they need. Note that CSRHUB ratings are not "real time" - we update our information about once per month. Most investors need real time data. Further, we aggregate information to give a high-level view of social performance. Most investors want details they can tie to specific trends, investment themes, or client needs. While we allow our users to create lists of companies, we do not support upload of portfolios and we do not provide any share prices, return tracking, or investment performance analysis. A good investment decision should be based also on the past and expected future financial performance of a company. There are also considerations of risk and diversification involved in an investment decision that are not covered by our data.
What types of data sources does CSRHUB use? We use data from Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) - also known as Environment, Social, Governance (ESG) analysis firms, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) such as foundations, associations, union groups, and activist groups, government databases, publications and research reports, and input from individual CSRHUB users. You can see a full list of our sources on our Data Sources page found at www.csrhub.com/our_data_sources. You can click through to learn more about each source from this page, or click on the source icon on any company page that you visit.
How reliable is the data CSRHUB uses? We find that our sources do not always agree with one another. However, in general, a company that ranks poorly on a certain aspect of social performance with one source will also rank poorly with other sources. Thanks to the large number of sources we use and the proprietary methods we use to process and adjust our data, we believe we capture most of the information our sources provide. As a result, our ratings are at least representative of the general state of knowledge about the social performance of the companies in our database and may represent the best-available information. Even so, we suggest that you contact a company or do your own additional research, before you take any social action against a company based on our ratings.
How does CSRHUB give ratings when it has only a few sources?Our sources overlap with each other in thousands of places. This allows us to gauge the relative attitude of each source and adjust for their biases. As a result, when we have only a few sources available for a particular company, we can adjust those sources—based on all of our experience—and create ratings that are consistent and, we hope, fair. If the amount of data we have falls below a certain level, we do not publish a rating. There are approximately another 5,000 companies for whom we have partial information—but not enough to provide a rating. For more information on how we calculate ratings, please review the information on this page.
Who are CSRHUB major data sources? Our major sources are listed and described on our Data Sources page found at www.csrhub.com/our_data_sources.
Who are CSRHUB major SRI/ESG data sources? Our major ESG sources include ASSET4 (Thomson Reuters), Governance Metrics International (merged with Corporate Library), IW Financial, Trucost and Vigeo.
Why should I subscribe? Subscribing to CSRHUB will give you access to an additional level of information detail on all of the 5,000+ companies we cover. If you have questions about the value of subscription, email us at support@csrhub.com. Also, review www.csrhub.com/content/our-products.
