November 4th, 2009

Questions to Benchmark Organizations’ Sustainability

I like the LinkedIn Q&A – think it’s a great tool. Makes for good blog entries, too. Here’s a question and the answer I provided just last week:

Q:  I’d like help developing survey questions to benchmark an organizations Sustainability. What are the best questions to ask?

My A: There are a lot of questions you can ask and some of the best questions may vary by not only industry sector, but size and other factors. Take a look at B Lab’s publicly available survey for a bunch of great, straightforward ones across sustainability categories, and look a the other resources listed below for more information.

Here are some more questions we ask our clients to ask themselves:

• What does your organization consider part of sustainability (environment, community involvement, people, philanthropy)?
• If not part, where do they fall in the organization?
• Have I mapped out and am I fully engaging with all of my stakeholders (customers, investors, employees, suppliers, partners, NGOs, governments, communities, etc.)?
• Do I have a sustainability issues map to help guide my efforts?
• Do I have a sustainability or environmental management system (SMS or EMS) to organize and guide my efforts?
• Am I engaged in life cycle analysis?
• Do I put together timely sustainability / CSR reports?
• Is sustainability integrated into my brand(s) and do I adequately educate consumers and other stakeholders on the issues?
• How do I successfully measure my sustainability efforts?

Here are some more questions we ask our clients to ask themselves from a communications perspective:

• How do you communicate with customers, employees, investors, & other stakeholders?
• How do you communicate your sustainability efforts with these stakeholders?
• How aligned is your sustainability messaging to your other communications & efforts?

Links:

• http://survey.bcorporation.net/register.php
• http://www.globalreporting.org/Home
• http://www.sDialogue.com