About Verteego's sustainability rating
Verteego is not a rating agency. Verteego Report is a comprehensive, intuitive, affordable online application that provides organizations with the tools they need to create and communicate their sustainability report. To repeat: Verteego is not a rating agency. An organization that is highly rated on Verteego is not necessarily more sustainable than the lowest rated organization. A higher rating indicates that an organization has provided Verteego with a more complete picture of its practices.
That being said, Verteego, as you have undoubtedly noticed, does provide a rating. This rating is not a performance rating, or risk rating, but a transparency rating. In other words, assuming that what your organization says is true (and according to the terms & conditions you agreed to, you are telling the truth) the more information your organization provides, the higher its rating.
The rationale behind this decision is the following: not only is it tough and almost philosophical to rate one action or result against another, but building a fair sustainability rating is just impossible. Here are a couple examples about managing stakeholders' risks to illustrate this point:
Say you hesitate between two contractors to clean your office building windows, a rather dangerous job. One contractor had 4 fatalities in the last 5 years, the other one had none. However, the latter's boss is known to be a racist. Everything else being equal, making your decision will be tough. It's subjective; it's your own judgment.
Okay, one less controversial example to complete the picture. You hesitate between two IT service companies to design your corporate website. One is highly energy efficient relative to the other one. However, the latter emits less carbon dioxide despite the fact that it consumes more energy. Which one do you pick? Hard to tell. Take a poll and you'll likely get a split decision.
How is the Verteego rating calculated?
Your organization gets points for every piece of information it provides to Verteego. As of today, one response adds one point to your overall score. For instance, you get one point for each of the following actions:
- Ticked radio button
- Ticked checkbox (1 out of n)
- Filled out text
- "Not relevant" ticked for a question
- Document uploaded (charter, logo, etc.)
- Key figure inserted
- Sustainability report made public
- Contact details filled in
- Colleague invited
-etc.
Your overall Verteego rating is the sum of these.
Because transparency is one of our mottos, here are two potential methodological changes we have been considering lately:
1) Vertical criteria weighing;
2) Community-generated rating methodology (or, to put it another way, open source).
We hope these explanations clear, but if you need clarification on any of these points, please let us know via the feedback tool in the questionnaires. Thank you for using Verteego.