Become A B Corp
The B Impact Assessment evaluates how your company’s operations and business model impact your workers, community, environment, and customers.
To obtain the B Corporation certification, a company first needs to complete the B Impact Assessment, which measures the positive impact of the company in areas of governance, workers, community, the environment. Companies that earn a minimum score of 80 out of 200 points undergo an assessment review process, essentially a conference call verifying the claims made in their assessment.
Step 1: Assess
Get started by answering a series of questions on the B Impact Assessment.
Step 2: Compare
See where your business is outperforming others, and where there’s room for improvement.
Step 3: Improve
Identify, track, and learn about improvement opportunities and best practices thanks to our free tools.
The B Impact Assessment is independently governed by a Standards Advisory Council, but its content is informed by and references many other social and environmental reporting and performance standards and certifications.
The B Impact Assessment is updated approximately every three years in order to improve the clarity, consistency, and insight of the assessment and its scoring, stay up to date with best practices and innovations in impact measurement, and accommodate ongoing user and stakeholder feedback. The first version of the BIA was released in 2007. Its current version, Version 6, was launched in January 2019.
The free B Impact Assessment enables companies to measure, manage, and improve their impact by answering a series of questions about business practices and outputs.You don’t have to be a B Corp to use this free and confidential tool, nor do you have to be a C-suite executive or seasoned sustainability professional.
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> 65 K
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> 250 K
Global BIA Users
The B Impact Assessment is divided into five stakeholder-focused“Impact Areas” — Governance, Workers, Community, Environment, and Customers.
Each impact area is organized by “Impact Topics” that describe the specific dimensions of impact relevant to that stakeholder.
There are impact topics that relate to the impact of a company’s day-to-day operations (those illustrated in white), as well as topics related to the impact of a company’s overall business model (those illustrated in color). You can learn more about how the B Impact Assessment distinguishes between operational impact and impact business modelshere.
The B Impact Assessment examines a company’s impact on their workers, community, environment, and customers. The B Impact Assessment also asks questions about a company’s governance structure and accountability. Questions are split into two categories: Operations, which covers a company’s day-to-day activities, and Impact Business Models, which awards additional points for business models designed to create additional positive impact. The B Impact Assessment is updated every three years.
The specific questions that appear in your assessment depend on your company’s track, which is the sector, size, and geography of your business.
Each question is assigned a relative weighting based on how difficult the practice is to implement and the directness of the indicator in assessing a positive impact on workers, communities, environment, and/or customers, as determined by B Lab’s independent Standards Advisory Council. For example, there are equally weighted questions, heavily weighted questions, less weighted questions, and unweighted questions. Generally speaking, questions measuring specific outputs and outcomes are more heavily weighted than questions about policies and practices. that you frequently don’t need to answer all options to get full credit, that “other” option is weighted less, etc.
B Lab recognizes that high-quality social and environmental business standards demand continuous improvement in order to meet principles of inclusion, independence, and credibility.
Our standards are therefore independently governed by B Lab’s Standards Advisory Council and Board of Directors. We also seek input from external stakeholders and various Working and Advisory Groups.
Our standards are updated and improved on a regular basis with all standards development projects informed by research and multi-stakeholder input. Learn more about our Standards here.
Together, we are shifting our economic system from profiting only the few to benefiting all, from concentrating wealth and power to ensuring equity, from extraction to regeneration, and from prioritizing individualism to embracing interdependence. Start your journey by taking our B Impact Assessment!
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