The process of B Corp certification
PLANET | B CORP
The process of B Corp certification
The pathway to B Corp certification starts with the B Impact Assessment ( BIA ), a free and confidential online tool that helps to measure and manage social and environmental performance across five key areas : Governance , Workers , Community , Environment and Customers .
According to Amy Bourbeau , Co-founder and Chief Impact Officer at Seismic , the assessment is “ tailored to companies based on their sizes and sector ” and involves around 300 questions . To pass the assessment , businesses must achieve a minimum of 80 points out of a potential approximate 200 . It is rare to achieve 80 on the first assessment , and the average is 50 .
Once a company has their baseline score , they build an improvement plan and identify the implementations they want to make to improve their impact and their score and set a time frame to do it in .
They must embed the B Corp mission into their legal documentation . “ Businesses can pick and choose what most resonates with them , but what ’ s important is to ensure implementation is carried out genuinely and accurately ,” says Amy .
Once 80 points are achieved , companies submit the assessment along with supporting evidence to be verified by B Lab . This marks just the beginning , as organisations must then maintain or improve scores , re-certifying every three years and publishing an annual impact report .
To ensure improvement , Amy recommends pulling in different members of the team , having senior leadership endorsement and encouragement , as well as different subject matter experts involved , and then make sure the plan trickles down through the business , so that it is actually being “ lived and breathed ”.
92 September 2022