PROGRAM OVERVIEW
The Green Challenges initial study yielded interesting results in that contrary to the number of news articles, advertisements and editorial comments relatively few of the business leaders in the United States have any commitment to the environment on their corporate website. There is a breakdown in communication of sustainability programs and policies from leadership to employees, stakeholders and consumers. For instance, only 334 members of the Fortune 1000 list in 2008 have any mention of sustainability on their website. If we drill in to that figure, it is easy to distinguish which of those organizations are leaders and which organizations are still lacking in information even though they have a page and/or section on their site for green commitments. The Green Challenges established basic research parameters and a combination of tools to evaluate those organizations that have made a commitment in an effort to draw best practices and strategies as well as increase accessibility to complex information.
The program focuses on delivering information and resources around the three primary objectives: education, transparency and outreach.
RESEARCH PARAMETERS
The objective for the primary research effort was simple - establish a baseline for corporate sustainability information on the web specifically targeting corporate websites. To do so we contemplated various depth levels to the research and determined the optimum initial strategy was to simply establish whether or not a corporate website had a specific link, page or section regarding its environmental commitment. See "Making the Grade" for more information on the specific evaluation metric. We also determined the best starting place would be the Fortune 1000 corporations as well as the Top 100 Law and Accounting Firms by revenue for 2008 under the assumption that revenue is an appropriate metric to determine corporate business leaders.
We cultivated the following basic information:
- Corporate Name
- Headquarter City/State
- Corporate Sector
- Corporate Industry
- 2008 Fortune 1000 Rank [Not applicable for Law/Accounting]
- Corporate Website Link
- CEO, COO and CSO Names
In addition we developed a basic profile regarding sustainability including:
- Sustainability Page/Section Link [If applicable]
- Corporate Sustainability Report Link [If applicable]
The challenge thus far is that while more than 80% of the organizations have no sustainability page or section that the remaining 20% has a large disparity between what is "good" environmental responsibility information and what is not. Additionally we were only able to conduct research for a very small pool of businesses relying on other databases and research without attaining a true temperature for corporate sustainability. Therefore The Green Challenges is in the process of developing a set of "detailed" tools including the Green Giant Series, Sustainable Sitemap Initiative and Open Source Project.