BCorp revisited

I’ve been on the BCorp trail for a few months now. In case you haven’t heard of them, BCorps are a business idea that it started in the USA. The B stands for benefit and a benefit corporation is a type of for-profit corporate entity that includes positive impact on society, workers, the community and the environment in addition to profit as its legally defined goals. B Corps are now a global phenomenon with over 2300 such businesses in the UK alone, a significant rise since the last time I looked.

I’ve been on the trail for one reason, related to CyberNorth. As a Community Interest Company, there is a strong alignment between our purpose and the aims of a BCorp. The main area of divergence is the focus on environmental issues which, while of concern to CyberNorth, is not its primary purpose.

Completing the BCorp Impact Assessment has been quite a chore. There are one hundred and seventy five questions to be answered over six impact areas, Governance, Workers, Community, Environment, Customers and Disclosure. Many questions are scored and add up to your overall score. At the time a score of eighty was sufficient to go forward for an assessment and we had got into the high seventies. 

Answering the questions is one thing, providing proof is another and we have had a lot of work to do to ensure we have the right policies and evidence. 

I thought we were nearly at the point of assessment when it turns out the BCorp had decided to change its criteria. This is understandable as many of the questions were not ideally suited to the different kinds of businesses that exist. CyberNorth can be considered as an outlier and doesn’t quite fit into many of their assumptions. As an example, CyberNorth doesn’t really have customers in the traditional sense. At times also, the questions are North American Centric and difficult to interpret. 

A  whole new series of questions have been added, with others amended. Our score had dropped to the low forties and I was left a bit crestfallen. Still, it didn’t take that long to respond and we’re back up to a score of 75.8. The good news is that there is no minimum threshold now and so we could go for assessment if we wanted. I’ve also taken the opportunity to list all the policies we need and responded to eighteen questions that we struggled to answer.

There is a bit more work to do yet I feel we’re getting close to a board decision, whether to go forward or not.