Improving your BIA score
B Corp certification requires a B Impact Assessment score of 80+ points. It’s rare to achieve this first time and most businesses will spend time improving their score.
Completing the Assessment and the 80+ point threshold
Completing the Assessment is different for every company and while scoring is intentionally rigorous, you should aim to submit with a score of around 80-85 points.
To become B Corp certified, your company must first complete the B Impact Assessment, the free, online platform used by B Lab to measure your social and environmental performance impact.
Crossing the 80-point threshold doesn’t usually happen at the first pass, but improving your business’s impact is made easier thanks to a range of tools and resources built into the B Impact Assessment. These show which impact areas your company already excels in, how your practices compare to other businesses and which it could improve on.
Best practice guides, case studies and other dynamic tools will help you create a clear roadmap, set goals for improvement, and track your performance over time.
Tools to help you within the Assessment
A number of tools are built into the B Impact Assessment to help guide you through the initial application and to help you identify and implement improvements.
Reports
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Bookmark Report: Highlight the questions on the Assessment you wish to revisit by clicking the bookmark icon in the upper right corner of a question.
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Customised Improvement Report: Once you have completed the Assessment, a report is generated automatically that identifies the key questions you could be performing better on to improve your current score. Find out more.
Learn More
On many of the questions within the Assessment, you will find a useful ‘Learn’ button, which provides you with further explanations, definitions and real-world examples of implementation, designed to fuel your improvement.
Exporting the BIA
It’s easy to organise and prioritise questions within the Assessment with the Question Filter (which allows you to choose between question type, impact area, content, points available and other attributes), plus the ability to export content in full as a PDF or Excel spreadsheet to share with your team.
Goal Setting
Create a roadmap for improvements by clicking the star in the right-corner of questions to set yourself goals for improvement. Set due dates, email reminders and add comments about how you will reach these goals.
Knowledge Base
This comprehensive resource hub is packed with detailed best practices guides to help you implement improvements, as well as a range of case studies to provide insight into the impact other B Corps have created.
Tips for improving your score
Some more ideas from B Lab and the B Corp Community to help you increase your score.
‘Quick Wins’
As you set out to improve your impact score, a great place to start is by formalising your company policies and tracking key metrics across the 5 Impact areas measured in the BIA.
For example:
- Writing and circulating a Supplier Code of Conduct (Community)
- Monitoring and recording energy, water and waste usage (Environment)
- Writing a policy or statement to support breastfeeding mothers (Workers)
- Sharing financial information with employees (Governance)
- Improving the transparency and clarity of your Data and Privacy Policy (Customers)
You’ll find more examples of Best Practices here.
Make it legal
Adopting the B Corp legal requirement will earn you from 7.5 - 10 points on the B Impact Assessment, by locking in your mission to put people and planet alongside profit.
Get support from your team
Appoint one person as a lead to complete the initial Assessment and engage support from employees across your whole business (even external stakeholders) to help identify areas where you can make real, lasting improvements and impact.
