Tailored consultancy just for you
Are you looking for someone to help you submit your B Impact assessment? Have you heard about the B Corp accreditation but are unsure where to start? Are you looking for an affordable, hard-working consultant to join your team for a short period, learn how you do your business and to suggest ways to get you closer to a B Corp accreditation?
General consultancy
Have you heard about the B Corp accreditation but are unsure where to start? Claire is an approachable consultant with experience taking a small business from 0 to 97.4 in the B Impact Assessment. The process helps to develop your business to put your mission and values at the heart of everything you do.
B Impact assessment
Are you looking for someone to help you submit your B Impact assessment? Claire is an affordable, hard-working consultant who can join your team to learn how you do your business and suggest ways to get you accredited. She can guide you and project manage you through the different stages of the assessment.
Impact reports for B Corps
Are you an existing B Corp business looking for help & advice from someone who has planned, structured & collated impact reports? As part of her freelance role at Made Open, Claire collates impact data from across the company and maintains regular quarterly and annual impact reports to share publicly.
Claire's B Corp experience
Made Open commissioned Claire as a part time freelancer in 2019 to help them become a certified B Corporation.
The Made Open team wanted to solidify their commitment to the communities they serve through their online community platforms and to make it clear that their business is intent on making a real difference. As a team, we think of the B-Corp community as a group of ethical, passionate and smart business people … a group Made Open wanted to be part of. B-Corp Certification shows both present and future clients that the company are committed to a social purpose.
There have been other unexpected benefits too. The process brought the team closer together and clarified the company's vision. Everyone at Made Open cares deeply about making a positive impact on the lives of others through their work.
The role
The B Corp consultant role encompassed many different tasks, responsibilities and goals. Claire worked with the small team at Made Open to get to know their business on a close and trusted level. She took the lead on understanding what was required from the B Impact Assessment and project managed the team (including the two directors) through a long list of development tasks and actions before sitting down to submit the assessment.
Claire worked with the directors on the assessment answers and led the verification process to collate all the necessary documents required to achieve the BIA score.
Co-director of Made Open, Robert Woolf -
"It was a no-brainer for Made Open to seek B Corp™ Certification and we're really proud to join a global movement of like-minded businesses. In many ways our achievement is also a symbol of commitment from our clients who licence our community platform and use our services. Together we're all working hard to help communities find sustainable solutions to the issues that matter to them. So thank you everyone - team effort!"
What makes you a B Corp and how are you doing business differently?
Our mission at Made Open is to create positive and sustainable social change using design and technology. Becoming a Certified B-Corp has helped our team to revisit our core values, renew our social and business goals and develop a set of performance measures in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
At Made Open, we licence our networking platform to organisations who wish to activate communities or networks around social goals. Each uniquely branded platform lets people, groups and organisations share information, ideas, skills, resources, projects and opportunities with each other. By enabling community-led or socially-responsible organisations to create better futures for themselves, our platform is helping 'collaborative communities' to take the lead in fixing their own problems and pursuing opportunities.
What challenges did you overcome when using the B Impact Assessment (BIA)?
Achieving Certified B-Corp status has been a long journey for us. The process has helped us to look introspectively at all aspects of our business; what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and how we measure our performance. We used the BIA tool to better articulate our vision and values at a fundamental level, and also to challenge ourselves on the impact we could be making.
The BIA helped us to think more deeply about our beneficiaries. Our platforms serve all types of communities including those working and living below the national poverty line. A major hurdle we had to overcome was to quantify how many people below the poverty line are supported by our various platforms (this is not a question we would ask people directly).
So we reached out to our clients to help us with this and also approximate based on national indexes. This process has helped us to rethink how we measure and record impact on our platform, and has also opened up a number of great conversations with our clients about gathering more accurate data.
What goal have you set for the year ahead at Made Open?
Other than maintaining and/or improving on our 97.4 B Impact Score?!
On a practical level, we're planning to bring out a series of new features this year including translations for non-English speaking users, encouraging businesses to integrate their corporate volunteer schemes into a 'Volunteer Bank' and improving the way we measure impact at individual / community / system levels.
In terms of B-Corp, it might surprise you to learn that we scored quite poorly on the 'Community' impact area, and that's because capturing evidence takes time. Another development we're hoping to make this year, therefore, is to let members self-define their own outcomes. This will allow members to measure / record their own progress - data they can share with others if they so wish (e.g. a Community Builder or Link Worker). In summary, we expect our score to improve in the next year or so as we build up a better picture of our platform's impact on the wellbeing of its members.
