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Blog | Thursday March 23, 2017

Lessons in Technology and Convergence from SXSW 2017

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Healthcare and social media platforms, dogs and tech wearables, environmental conservation and virtual reality—to many, these topics seem dramatically divergent. But while attending this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, I found that they are anything but.

SXSW brings together global professionals from across industries to network and explore diverse topics in the worlds of tech, entertainment, and culture. Tracks ranged from brands and marketing to health, and from web development and coding to government. And while these tracks attracted participants working in completely different arenas, one underlying theme ran throughout the event: convergence.

As Kevin Clark of the Center for Digital Media Innovation and Diversity at George Mason University put forth in a session on addressing gender norms in entertainment media, the world of technology and media is an ecosystem; it doesn’t operate in isolation. More and more, companies, particularly in the technology sector, are partnering with other companies, foundations, governments, and nonprofits to collaborate on global issues and use emerging technologies to drive social and environmental progress. In our increasingly connected world, businesses and others are finding that they, too, must find ways to come together.

Under the overarching theme of convergence, here are four trends from SXSW for companies in all sectors to keep an eye on.

1. The emergence of augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) 

These terms were everywhere, and you couldn’t walk more than a city block without an opportunity to play around with the latest gadgets. While AR and VR technologies are still nascent, many conversations revolved around the question of how they will be used—including as a tool for generating empathy and driving and scaling societal change. I put on VR goggles to go “under the canopy” in the Amazon rainforest as part of an effort led by Conservation International with support from HP Inc., Jaunt, Johnson & Johnson, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Tiffany & Co. Foundation to raise awareness of the region and its value to human well-being. In a session on VR as a tool for accelerating global policy change, I also learned about Merck For Mothers’ work using VR to immerse policymakers in maternal health issues in their countries and remind government officials of the healthcare for which they are responsible.

2. Connections between technology and journalism, activism, and politics

Following 2016’s Brexit vote and U.S. presidential election, much of SXSW was focused on what the current political climate means for big data tracking, communications and journalism, and the relationship between government and technology. As U.S. Senator Cory Booker stated in the Interactive opening keynote, “If we are silent in the face of injustice, we are complicit in that injustice.” Booker was joined on stage by Google’s Senior Counsel on Civil and Human Rights Malika Saada Sar, and they discussed the role technology played and will continue to play in politics and how it can be an essential tool for “re-stitching our fractured society.” Other sessions also focused on fake news and “alternative facts”—one speaker offered potential solutions for social media platforms to fix algorithms so that they eliminate echo chambers and show users more diverse views, with the aim of reducing political polarization. She also suggested that, as artificial intelligence (AI) expands, those companies will have more responsibility for their influence on users.  

3. Partnerships between tech and other sectors

Innovation and disruption reign at SXSW, and this year emphasized how tech intersects with other sectors, particularly health and medicine. For example, David Karp, the CEO of Tumblr, is leading an initiative to create tech community support for Planned Parenthood—using #TechStandsWithPP as the rallying hashtag to generate support for access to healthcare in the United States. In his keynote, former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden celebrated the technology sector for its dedication to cancer research. He urged innovators to help with electronic data-sharing and to connect and empower cancer patients. Other notable discussions included lessons that healthcare can borrow from tech, including using rideshare apps to connect patients with medical services, using VR to alleviate pain after surgery, and even how technology can enhance veterinary medicine and the relationship between humans and dogs.

4. Machine learning and AI

Nearly every day, the SXSW program featured multiple sessions on the future of AI and its societal implications. While AI and automation will benefit society in many ways, they are also already negatively affecting jobs and changing the nature of work. With ubiquity of AI on the horizon, conversations throughout the week focused on everything from the ethical use of AI therapists to chat bots and other AI innovations in marketing to governance, policy, and transparency issues.

Innovation is everywhere, and SXSW showcased how previously separate worlds are converging to connect people to information and services, increase empathy for global societal issues, and affect policy change.

And now, thanks to the countless innovations exhibited at SXSW, I’m also one step closer to finally being able to “speak dog.”

Blog | Wednesday February 26, 2025

Protecting Children in the Digital Environment: The Role of Impact Assessments

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There is more awareness of the impact of technology on children than ever before. Despite the many benefits that digital technology provides to children (e.g., access to education, free expression, and maintaining social connections), concerns are rising around the adverse impacts on mental health, attention, and protection from harm.

In 2023, Amazon entered a US$25 million settlement with the US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission over charges related to children’s privacy. In 2024, concerns about children and social media platforms regularly made headlines. State attorneys general in the US sued social media companies alleging harms to children’s safety and well-being. The US surgeon general called for warning labels on social media platforms, and several tech CEOs publicly apologized to parents whose children were harmed by social media.

In response, regulators have begun to take action to address these harms. The UK passed an Online Safety Act that requires online platforms to prevent children from accessing age-inappropriate or harmful content. In Australia, efforts to protect children from harm has resulted in a social media ban for children under 16. Companies developing and deploying tech tools are being required to take stock of their impacts on children’s rights and the effectiveness of their measures to address such impacts.

While companies, governments, and civil society actors are increasingly invested in addressing the adverse impacts of technology on children, approaches remain inconsistent and fragmented. Research shows that company approaches are often focused on protection issues (e.g., illegal content and freedom from exploitation or sexual abuse) and responding to legal mandates, which may cause issues related to children’s participation in the digital environment (e.g., freedom of expression or access to culture) to be overlooked. Furthermore, current approaches to assessing impacts on children are often seen by companies as a "one-and-done" exercise, rather than an ongoing process that integrates external perspectives and evolves as new technologies and use habits arise.

Several factors complicate our ability to fully understand and mitigate the adverse impacts of technology on children, including the rapid pace of technological advancement, regulatory discrepancies across different jurisdictions, and the limited availability of data about children across diverse ages, socioeconomic statuses, gender identities, geographies, and individual circumstances. As a result of these challenges and the gaps in their current approaches, companies fail to track and mitigate evolving risks to children.

Child Rights Impact Assessments

Companies have a responsibility to identify and address adverse human rights impacts associated with their operations, products, and services.

To assess impacts to children in particular, companies can conduct Child Rights Impact Assessments. CRIAs are an effective way for companies to systematically evaluate their impacts on child rights as defined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and other internationally accepted human rights and child rights instruments. Similar to a Human Rights Impact Assessment, the CRIA uses a methodology informed by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and seeks input from rightsholders to identify a company’s impacts on children’s rights, prioritize these impacts based on their severity, and determine appropriate action to address them.

In 2023, UNICEF engaged BSR to explore how companies are leveraging CRIAs and help develop a CRIA tool that companies operating in the digital environment can use to systematically identify, assess, and address their impacts on child rights. The project involved extensive research into existing resources to assess companies’ impacts on children, a review of current CRIA tools and practices, an assessment of child rights considerations in new regulations, and engagement with 130 stakeholders.

BSR has published a paper that brings together key findings from this research, as well as our observations on how companies are currently approaching child rights impact assessments in relation to the digital environment. It is a precursor to the digital environment CRIA tool that UNICEF will publish in 2025.

Benefits of Conducting CRIAs

BSR’s review of the current landscape showed that while many companies seek to understand their actual and potential impacts on children in the digital environment, few use CRIAs to do so. For companies operating in the digital environment, CRIAs can be a helpful tool for several reasons: 

• CRIAs allow companies to assess their impacts against the full list of child rights. Assessing against a comprehensive list of rights ensures that key issues or new impacts are not overlooked and constitutes a defensible methodology that is grounded in international human rights instruments.
• CRIAs can enable age-appropriate design through early consideration of risks and opportunities. Proactively engaging stakeholders and identifying the potential risks/opportunities allows companies to integrate these considerations into the design of a technology product and address harms before they become more severe, which can happen quickly in the digital environment.   
• CRIAs can support companies’ regulatory compliance efforts. Regulations like the EU Digital Services Act, UK Online Safety Act, Australian Online Safety Act, and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive require companies to assess risks to people, including children, and implement mitigation measures. CRIAs can help companies address these requirements by aligning with UNGPs due diligence approach and integrating findings into broader human rights and regulatory risk assessments.

As the digital environment continues to shape children’s lives and regulatory expectations continue to grow, respecting, protecting, and fulfilling child rights should be a priority for all businesses that engage with digital technologies—whether they are developers, deployers, or users. UNICEF’s development of a CRIA tool specific to the digital environment is a critical step in that process.

Explore BSR’s full report for detailed insights on why CRIAs are an essential practice and what to expect from UNICEF’s forthcoming tool.

Blog | Monday November 5, 2018

Our Human Rights Impact Assessment of Facebook in Myanmar

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Today, Facebook has published the human rights impact assessment (HRIA) of the company’s presence in Myanmar that it engaged BSR to undertake earlier this year.

The question of how social media platforms can respect the freedom of expression rights of users while also protecting rightsholders from harm is one of the most pressing challenges of our time.

This challenge is even more testing in Myanmar, where the majority of the population is still developing the digital literacy required to navigate the complex world of information sharing online, and where a minority of users are seeking to use Facebook as a platform to undermine democracy and incite offline violence. The lack of rule of law and recent political, economic, and social history in Myanmar add to the challenging environment.

We didn’t want the HRIA to reproduce what was already known—so we asked ourselves, what can we do to help increase human rights protections in the future?

Last month, the UN Human Rights Council’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar concluded that serious crimes under international law have been committed by military and security forces that warrant criminal investigation and prosecution. The use of Facebook to spread anti-Muslim, anti-Rohingya sentiment featured prominently in the Mission’s report.

In this context, the commissioning of this comprehensive HRIA is an important new milestone in business efforts to undertake due diligence and respect human rights. Facebook’s decision to publish the report in unredacted form also demonstrates an impressive commitment to transparency and sets an example for other companies to follow.

The challenging human rights context for Facebook and questions about the company’s response have been well-documented by international bodies, civil society organizations, and the media. Given this context, we didn’t want the HRIA to reproduce what was already known—so we asked ourselves, what can we do to help increase human rights protections in the future?

At the basic level, addressing this question meant thoroughly applying the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to the letter—identifying and prioritizing Facebook’s actual and potential human rights impacts and making recommendations for how to address them.

However, we concluded that answering this question would require us to be disciplined in two very important ways.

First, it was essential to take an inclusive approach. We consulted directly with over 60 potentially affected rightsholders and stakeholders during two visits to Myanmar by BSR staff, and we made sure that we spoke to as diverse a range of voices as we were able to in the time available. This approach generated very important insights. While many stakeholders—and Facebook itself—emphasized that Facebook’s efforts have fallen short in the past, we witnessed a strong determination from everyone we spoke with, inside and outside Facebook, to address human rights in Myanmar as a matter of utmost importance and urgency. We are hopeful about collaborative efforts, both now and over the long-term.

Second, it was essential to take a distinctly forward-looking approach. Understanding the mistakes and shortcomings of the past established crucial context, but it was important that we focused on forward-looking analysis and recommendations.

This approach led to us make recommendations in five main areas. These recommendations are shaped by the observation that Facebook’s human rights impacts in Myanmar cannot be addressed by Facebook alone, but also require system-wide change:

1. Governance and accountability at Facebook, including human rights policies, formalized governance structures, and public communications.
2. Community standards enforcement by Facebook, such as continuing to build a cross-functional team that understands the local Myanmar context, as well as a stricter implementation of Facebook’s credible violence policy and further development of artificial intelligence solutions that support human decision-making.
3. Engagement, trust, and transparency, such as publishing a local, Myanmar-specific version of Facebook’s Community Standards Enforcement Report and supporting international mechanisms created to investigate violations of international human rights.
4. System-wide change, including advocacy efforts aimed at policy, legal, and regulatory reform and continued investment in efforts to increase digital literacy and counter hate speech.
5. Risk mitigation and opportunity enhancement, such as preparations for the 2020 elections in Myanmar and for the possibility that WhatsApp becomes more commonly used, as well as the development of new products and services that accelerate growth of the digital economy in Myanmar.

Facebook’s blog to accompany the publication of the HRIA described in some detail the company’s stance and current status for each of these five areas.

We believe that the implementation of these recommendations is far more important than the HRIA itself. For this reason, we hope that the publication of the HRIA in full provides three main benefits: first, to provide a clear action plan for Facebook; second, to increase awareness of the human rights approaches available to Facebook and other technology companies engaged in Myanmar; and third, to stimulate further dialogue, collaboration, and solutions.

The report was made possible thanks to the many stakeholders and rightsholders in Myanmar who participated in the assessment process. We encourage everyone interested in the human rights situation in Myanmar to read the report in full, and we look forward to updates from Facebook in the future on its progress implementing the recommendations.

Blog | Wednesday September 27, 2017

How We Can Use Big Data to Understand Sustainability Risks and Opportunities

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We live in a world where sustainability challenges are among the most contentious topics of conversation for millions of individuals who are now able to publish their experiences, hopes, dreams, and fears online. Local conflicts and problems can quickly escalate into global reputational threats to companies, as stakeholders share their perceptions and concerns across online and social media, driving fluid and evolving advocacy agendas. At the same time, businesses have unprecedented opportunities to engage with customers, employees, suppliers, and communities to enhance their products and services, manage their risks, and tackle systemic challenges.

In short, stakeholder engagement has never been more important—or the opportunities to leverage it to better understand material issues this diverse. That is why today we are delighted to announce our new partnership with big data intelligence firm Polecat. Polecat is an award-winning and analyst-endorsed software firm based in London that helps organizations interrogate online conversations to identify strategic and operational risks for their reputations and licenses to operate. The company uses artificial and human intelligence to scan and interpret the universe of unstructured data from online and social media, giving users rapid insight into key trends and influencers shaping debate about their businesses as related to specific assets, brands, geographies, and value drivers to enable faster, smarter decisions and interventions.  

BSR will use the Polecat platform to help our members understand and anticipate changes in our current dynamic environment—work that will complement our new Sustainable Futures Lab, which we introduced last week. This will allow BSR to scope consulting and research projects that use big data analysis to amplify our expertise on key sustainability topics.

Polecat’s platform will enhance our ability to help members explore stakeholder perceptions about their material risks and opportunities, conduct sector and country analysis, and design more robust engagement plans. We will be able to provide data-driven insights on material issues, which can be used to define, sense, or differentiate sustainability priorities. We will also be able to examine both existing perceptions and emerging issues, or ‘weak signals,’ to help organizations create more future-oriented strategies. Over time, we will work with Polecat to design new offerings and tools for our members.

“We are proud and delighted that BSR has chosen to work with Polecat to help enhance its members’ insights and decisions with regard to the many pressing sustainability challenges that the world faces, and where business and markets have a critical role to play in helping shape the future,” said Polecat CEO James Lawn. “Our software is developed precisely to provide actionable intelligence on these types of risks and opportunities that are so defining of corporate reputations today.”

By combining Polecat’s insights with our deep expertise in climate change, human rights, inclusive economy, supply chain sustainability, sustainability management, and women’s empowerment, we will continue to help companies create transformative strategies that are fit for the future.

As BSR celebrates its 25th anniversary and Polecat its 10th, we look forward to collaborating to enhance how we advise and support our members in making the smartest, best-informed decisions for a just and sustainable world. Caroline Skipsey from Polecat will speak on a panel on the "Era of Misinformation" at the BSR Conference 2017 in Huntington Beach, California, this October, and we invite you to join us to discuss opportunities to leverage these capabilities for your sustainability strategy.

Blog | Thursday September 22, 2022

Human Rights Due Diligence of Meta’s Impacts in Israel and Palestine in May 2021

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In September 2021, Meta commissioned BSR to review the human rights impacts of the company’s policies and activities during the May 2021 crisis in Israel and Palestine. Today, we are publishing the results of BSR’s analysis in Arabic, English, and Hebrew.

BSR would like to thank everyone that participated in this review and provided their valuable time, insights, and perspectives.

The discussions we held with affected stakeholders to inform this review brought home to us how so many detailed decisions about social media policy, technology, and practice have fundamental impacts on the protection, realization, and fulfillment of human rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples—especially in the context of highly complex social and historical dynamics. We hope this review informs actions that result in meaningful improvements in the daily lives of all people connected to Israel and Palestine.

The primary purpose of the human rights due diligence is to provide Meta with prioritized, action-oriented, decision-useful, and forward-looking recommendations for policies and practices. In doing so, this human rights due diligence helps fulfill Meta’s commitments under its Corporate Human Rights Policy and responsibilities under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs).

Specifically, Principle 20 of the UNGPs states that companies should track the effectiveness of their response to human rights impacts by engaging with stakeholders, integrating findings into relevant processes, and driving continuous improvement. Principle 22 states that companies should provide for or cooperate in the remediation of adverse impacts, including seeking to guarantee non-repetition of prior harms.

This human rights due diligence also helps fulfill the recommendation of the Meta Oversight Board that Meta should engage an independent entity not associated with either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to determine whether Meta’s content moderation in Arabic and Hebrew has been applied without bias.

BSR found that Meta took many appropriate actions during the May 2021 crisis, including establishing a special operations center and crisis response team, prioritizing risks of imminent offline harm, seeking an approach to content removal and visibility based on necessary and proportionate restrictions consistent with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) Article 19(3), and overturning policy enforcement errors in response to user appeals. For this reason, some of BSR’s recommendations build upon important foundations for a human rights-based approach to content governance that have already been established by Meta.

However, BSR also identified a variety of adverse human rights impacts for Meta to address, including impacts on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression and related rights, the prevalence of anti-Semitic content on Meta platforms, and instances of both over-enforcement (erroneously removed content and erroneous account penalties) and under-enforcement (failure to remove violating content and failure to apply penalties to offending accounts).  

BSR did not identify intentional bias at Meta, but did identify various instances of unintentional bias where Meta policy and practice (such as insufficient routing of Arabic content by dialect or regional expertise), combined with broader external dynamics (such as efforts to comply with US law), leads to different human rights impacts on Palestinian and Arabic-speaking users.

BSR has made 21 recommendations to Meta to address these adverse human rights impacts and bias.

Four recommendations relate to content policy, such as reviewing Meta’s policies relating to content that praises or glorifies violence, and specific elements of Meta’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy.

Four recommendations relate to transparency, such as increasing the breadth, specificity, and granularity of information provided to users about Meta content policy enforcement, such as when action is taken on their content or accounts.

Ten recommendations relate to operations, such as determining the market composition (e.g., headcount, language, location) needed for rapid response capacities, the routing of potentially violating Arabic content to reviewers by dialect and region, improving classifiers (algorithms that assist with content moderation by identifying and sorting content that may violate Meta’s content policies), developing mechanisms to track hate speech based on type, and enhancing content moderation quality control processes to prevent large-scale errors.

Finally, three recommendations relate to systems change that goes beyond just Meta, such as how counterterrorism law applies to the social media industry and support for access to remedy.

The UNGPs lay out the expectation that Meta should avoid infringing on the human rights of others and should address adverse human rights impacts with which it is involved. In a conflict-affected context like Israel and Palestine, this includes understanding how ongoing conflict dynamics intersect with Meta’s platforms, how the online actions of a range of actors are possibly shaping offline events, and which groups are particularly vulnerable to adverse human rights impacts connected to Meta’s platforms given the conflict context.

We believe that BSR’s human rights due diligence will help Meta fulfill these expectations, and we look forward to Meta making progress reviewing and implementing our recommendations. We also hope that the insights we’ve shared today can inform the efforts of policy makers and other social media companies addressing complex challenges of content governance globally, especially in conflict-affected contexts.

Blog | Monday April 29, 2019

Why 2019 Is the Year of Stakeholder Trust

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In 2019, the question of how to build and retain trust—among investors, regulators, customers, suppliers, civil society organizations, and the general public—is the most pressing challenge facing business.

The stakes have never been higher. The average tenure of a business on the S&P 500 shrank from 33 years in 1964 to 24 years in 2016 and is forecast to last a mere 12 years by 2027. Competition, innovation, and technological disruption, while important drivers, tell only part of the story. If a business is not trusted by its stakeholders, it will not be able to maintain revenue, let alone grow, and may soon find its very existence imperiled.

To make matters even more challenging, societies worldwide are experiencing a crisis of leadership and trust in institutions across government, business, and the media. Hyper-transparency, geopolitics, social inequalities, and the increasing fragility of global governance mechanisms are all contributing factors. Businesses must now navigate an increasingly fraught external environment via a combination of firm core principles and imaginative new approaches.

In 2011, BSR published a five-step guide to stakeholder engagement in response to requests from companies for practical guidance on how to navigate the tricky topic of identifying, interacting with, and responding to external voices. The appetite for this topic has been insatiable: the 2011 report has consistently ranked among BSR’s top five most-viewed reports since its publication. And as effective engagement with society continues to be a topic of enormous, ongoing interest, we have just released an updated version of our report to account for major developments over the last eight years that have made the stakes higher than ever.

Why is stakeholder trust so important today?

First, an exponential increase in transparency means that companies must behave as if everything they say or do might become public.

Information becomes available at an ever-accelerating pace. While it is still disseminated primarily on dominant technology platforms, our understanding of facts and truth is far more contested and diffuse. Public concern over social and environmental issues can escalate rapidly on social media (ocean plastics are a recent example) and hyper-local conflicts between business and communities can generate global reputational crises.

Employees are also emerging as one of a company’s most vocal, empowered stakeholder groups; they increasingly invite wider, deeper scrutiny of their employers via media interviews, data leaks, petitions, and even walkouts.

Contractual confidentiality clauses are no longer an effective way to manage this new dynamic: The boundary between the corporation and society has grown permeable. Companies need to embrace strategies that make transparency, timeliness, and accountability core operating principles while bearing in mind that workers may view their social responsibilities as more urgent and compelling than their employers’ short-term profit targets.

Evidence signals that consideration of environmental, social, and governance issues is highly correlated with corporate performance over the long term.

Second, even big investors are declaring that an exclusive focus on company interests has become counter-productive.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink made a pressing case for strategic stakeholder engagement in his 2019 annual letter, noting: “Companies that fulfill their purpose and responsibilities to stakeholders reap rewards over the long-term. Companies that ignore them stumble and fail. This dynamic is becoming increasingly apparent as the public holds companies to more exacting standards. And it will continue to accelerate as millennials—who today represent 35 percent of the workforce—express new expectations of the companies they work for, buy from, and invest in.”

This quote reflects a broader shift in investor sentiment. Evidence signals that consideration of environmental, social, and governance issues is highly correlated with corporate performance over the long term. Companies that rely on one-way, PR-led approaches to manage these issues will not thrive. Fink’s challenge necessitates a robust engagement strategy in which companies determine how to weigh and balance a broadening array of overlapping and conflicting interests in a transparent and defensible way.

Finally, companies in 2011 primarily understood stakeholder engagement as a way to understand and manage reputational risk.

A key question in any mapping exercise was “Can we trust the stakeholder?” Today, it is usually more important to ask: “Can the stakeholder trust us?” The development of international frameworks that shape sustainability efforts, most notably the UN Guiding Principles on Human Rights, has driven a shift in emphasis toward corporate impacts on society and away from self-interested risk considerations.

We have substantively updated our framework to reflect these developments, emphasizing such new stakeholder mapping criteria as vulnerability, developing a new set of core engagement principles, and shifting the focus away from one-way information-gathering and toward building mutual trust and understanding. We have also considered stakeholder engagement in the context of new business models such as digital platforms, wherein companies face billions of stakeholders and can have an unprecedented impact on their lives.

Stakeholder engagement may seem more difficult and overwhelming than ever, but it needn’t be. Our updated report takes full account of how the world has changed while maintaining our original focus on practicality and clarity. BSR’s goal is to help companies build a deeper understanding of the social systems in which they operate—and to help them develop purposeful direction in pursuing their own goal of building sustainable trust.

Blog | Thursday November 9, 2017

The Sustainability Form 10-K: A Proposal

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I believe we need an equivalent of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Form 10-K for sustainability reporting. Allow me to explain why.

The Form 10-K and sustainability reports serve very similar purposes. The Form 10-K is required to contain the information necessary for informed decision-making by investors, while the sustainability report is expected to contain the information necessary for informed decision-making by a wider range of stakeholders.

However, the Form 10-K and the sustainability report have evolved to achieve these outcomes in very different ways.

Every company’s Form 10-K has an identical structure, and this makes it easy for analysts to know where to find the information they need. As someone said to me recently, “We all know our way around a Form 10-K.”

By contrast, sustainability reports come in many different shapes and sizes, and this makes the work of sustainability analysts assessing company performance on these issues much more difficult. We don’t all know our way around a sustainability report.

For example, every company’s Form 10-K contains a description of the business strategy, an analysis of the organization’s financial conditions and results of operations, material risk factors, financial statements, and executive compensation information. The information is numbered consistently, located in the same place, and presented the same way, which makes it relatively straightforward to compare companies across these metrics.

I believe that the usefulness of the sustainability report would be greatly enhanced by a similarly consistent structure. For example, every report could contain a list of sustainability risks and opportunities, a description of sustainability governance and management approach, an analysis of the company’s sustainability condition and performance, and a sustainability results statement. Comparability would be much easier if this information were always presented in the same way, with the same order and numbering.

There are four potential objections to my proposal.

1. It could be argued that sustainability reporting shouldn’t have its own version of the Form 10-K, and that instead sustainability information should be included in the “real” Form 10-K. I agree that sustainability information of material significance to investors should indeed be included in the “real” Form 10-K, ideally using the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) standards. I also believe that business strategies should focus on long-term value creation with sustainability as a foundation. However, as SASB states, a lot of sustainability information sought by stakeholders is not of material interest to reasonable investors, and therefore it should not be included in the “real” Form 10-K.
2. Along similar lines, it could be argued that this proposal works against the trend toward the integrated thinking and integrated reporting promoted by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC). I believe that an integrated narrative about how the company creates value is essential—however, the focus of the IIRC is on the creation of a concise narrative, not on the creation of a new report with the high level of detail found in a Form 10-K. As the IIRC conciseness principle states, “an integrated report is a concise communication about how an organization’s strategy, governance, performance, and prospects ... lead to the creation of value.”
3. It could be argued that the GRI content index already serves this purpose. To an extent this is true, as the GRI content index establishes a common numbering system and structure for sustainability information. The GRI standards also provide a highly credible list of content for inclusion in my proposed sustainability version of the Form 10-K. However, the reality is that most GRI content indexes are long lists of links, which do not provide the same level of usefulness or convenience as the Form 10-K. The GRI content index is a list, not a report.
4. Finally, it could be argued that my proposed “consistently structured form” approach is outdated in the age of the internet and social media. However, I believe the reverse is true—just as companies communicate their business strategies and performance in many ways outside the Form 10-K, so a sustainability version of the Form 10-K would store year-on-year comparable information in one formal location, freeing up space to communicate sustainability strategy and performance in other, more innovative ways. No longer would the sustainability report need to be all things to all people, and no longer would report writers feel the need to create catchy new report themes every year.

We live in the so-called “post-fact world,” an era of misinformation where public trust in business, government, and the media is at an all-time low. I believe this raises the stakes when it comes to the quality, robustness, and comparability of sustainability disclosures, as well as the importance of rigorous reporting processes.

A sustainability version of the Form 10-K can be part of the business response to this new era—and if reaction to this blog is positive, I’d be happy to propose a template.

Blog | Thursday September 9, 2021

Reimagining Investment: Human Rights in Venture Capital

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The increasingly widespread media coverage of surveillance and spyware technologies used to track ethnic and racial minorities and immigrants and surveil journalists, human rights activists, and other prominent figures has put a spotlight on the role of private equity firms, including venture capital (VC) investors, in financing human rights abuses in the United States and abroad.

By providing critical funding for technology start-ups, VC firms play a crucial gatekeeper role, deciding which companies make it onto the market, and ultimately, which technologies shape our lives. This has far-reaching consequences for human rights. While digital technologies present opportunities for economic growth, environmental protection, and the realization of human rights, such innovation can be associated with widespread infringements on privacy and free expression, enable the proliferation of hate speech fueling offline violence, and deepen inequalities, including through "algorithmic discrimination"—affecting people in the job market, accessing loans and public services, and in the criminal justice system.

Despite these societal harms, a July 2021 report released by Amnesty International found that “the vast majority of the world’s most influential venture capitalist firms operate with little to no consideration of the human rights impact of their decisions.” The report concludes that “the absence of human rights policies and due diligence processes amongst VC firms has significant consequences for human rights,” citing a range of examples, such as investments in companies that provide support for the repression of the Uyghur population in China.

These findings run contrary to the global expectation that businesses of all sectors and sizes, including VC firms, take the necessary steps to ensure that their business activities and value chains respect internationally recognized human rights. Unanimously endorsed by governments in the UN Human Rights Council in 2011, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) are the authoritative global framework outlining the responsibility of businesses to respect human rights.

Managing human rights risks is not only good for people—it is also good for business. 

Managing human rights risks is not only good for people—it is also good for business. Public equity investors have already recognized the relationship between human rights risks, including digital and labor rights, and the material costs on return (e.g., SASB standards, Investor Statement on Corporate Accountability for Digital Rights, and digital rights-related resolutions in 2019). A 2019 Harvard study on VC found a link between start-up technology companies that fail and poor performance in addressing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks. IPO valuations have also been threatened due to business models that undermine human rights. Firms may even be exposed to legal risks connected to their investments in companies that develop high-risk technologies, while reputational risks are increasing due to the growing focus of NGO advocacy on private capital and human rights.

Tech companies themselves are also realizing this. Growing pressure from regulators, civil society, employees, and shareholders over the human rights abuses connected to their business models, products, and services has led many publicly listed tech companies to adopt human rights policies and take due diligence measures to address risks.

VC firms can meet their human rights responsibilities, help shape a world where technology contributes to social progress, and increase their financial returns by deploying approaches based on the following three principles: 

• Adopt a policy commitment to respect internationally recognized human rights. The policy should set out the human rights expectations of start-up companies, which should be clearly communicated, including during pitching sessions and on the VCs website.
• Conduct human rights due diligence. VC firms should update their core business activities to manage human rights risks. Known as human rights due diligence, this means that VCs need to know the risks to people connected to their investment portfolios and show how they address these risks. This involves assessing how the firm invests and putting in place structures that identify and address risks to people as an inherent part of doing business. This includes processes and mechanisms for engaging stakeholders, including civil society with the relevant knowledge and expertise, to identify the risks and real-world impacts connected to investment portfolios. To show the constructive role they play in strengthening the human rights performance of start-ups, VC firms should also disclose their human rights risk management approach, including through formal reporting.
• Provide space and resources for entrepreneurs to do their due diligence: A core aspect of VC’s own due diligence involves using leverage to enable and support start-ups in their efforts to respect human rights. This may include offering start-ups trainings and tools that support their ability to manage human rights risks, connecting entrepreneurs with business and human rights experts, and encouraging them to assess business models, products, and services to identify human rights risks. Where a VC sits on the board of directors, they should also seek to shape and embed a rights-respecting culture within the company and ensure that the board provides appropriate oversight.

By supporting company founders in their mission to grow their businesses responsibly, VCs can play a transformative role in shaping the behavior and culture of emerging companies and the associated outcomes for society. The UNGPs provide a roadmap for VC firms to reimagine the way they conduct investment, helping to ensure that addressing risks to people is a fundamental part of their core business.

Blog | Thursday January 7, 2021

Business and the Renewal of American Democracy

Preview

The horrific storming of the U.S. Capitol building this week is yet another “shocked but not surprised” event during the dwindling days of Donald Trump’s presidency. Historians will have much to assess from this tragic period but there are numerous lessons for business leaders to consider today.

There can be no doubt that all American institutions—including business—must engage in very serious soul-searching about the factors that enabled the behaviors that reached their apotheosis in mob violence against the Peoples’ House, the U.S. Capitol.

Let me start by saying that we all know that there are very good reasons why businesses, and business leaders, do not weigh in on all, or even most, political questions. We know that most CEOs, whatever their political views, long for a time when they can focus primarily on their businesses, and leave political questions to elected officials.

But this is not such a time.

It is time for business leaders to stand for rule of law in the United States.

It is time for business leaders to call for democratic reforms – not an ersatz commission to explore non-existent election fraud. It is urgent that we restore the smooth functioning of government, such that voter suppression ends and one person, one vote is more than a slogan.

It is time for business leaders to renew their call for equitable law enforcement. As so many have noted, the racial disparities in policing were—again—tragically clear when only scattered arrests occurred after the Capitol was stormed. The contrast with the brutal manner in which protestors for racial justice were treated outside of the White House last summer could not be starker. 

It is time for business leaders to forcefully push back on the many forms of denialism – election denial, vaccine denial, COVID-19 denial, and yes, climate denial, all of which have poisoned American politics and result in death.   

And yes, it is time for business leaders to call out Donald Trump, by name, to ensure that he can do no further damage.  The National Association of Manufacturers—which no one would place on the left of the political spectrum—has called for consideration of removing Donald Trump from office under the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. More should follow.

It is also time to stop supporting those who enabled the slow and steady rot we have seen the past four years. This means ceasing contributions to those officeholders who challenged the clear and legitimate result of the 2020 Presidential election. (The bankruptcy of America’s campaign finance system was laid bare yesterday as fundraising solicitations on the basis of election challenges were issued even as the hordes were defiling the halls of the U.S. Congress.) This also means not doing business with media outlets that have allowed outright lies and falsehoods to pollute the political discourse in the U.S.

And it is also time for business to think hard about its role in enabling the hijacking of the U.S. government over the past four years. To the degree the business community stood by to take tax cuts they knew would not generate job growth, but would exacerbate income inequality, that is a big problem. To the degree campaign contributions kept flowing to candidates and elected officials who were knowingly misleading the American public, that is a big problem. To the degree that business leaders did not demand further action to address systemic racism, that is a big problem.

As Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote in The New York Times the morning after the events at the U.S. Capitol, business is all about accountability—and we deserve more of it today than ever. When systems fail, a review is conducted to understand what went wrong and how to make fixes that are strong and lasting. That is what great business leaders do. Today, the story is an American one—but it applies to every global business we work with around the world as well.

The failings of the political system were on vivid, heart-wrenching display on January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. Change will not come if it is debated only in the halls of the U.S. Congress or on social media. Change must also be debated in every boardroom, so that business leaders rise to the occasion, not only to prevent further damage over the next 13 days, but also so that the necessary renewal of American democracy is a high priority for American business.

Blog | Monday October 23, 2017

All the Ways to Follow Us at #BSR17

Preview

Tomorrow, we’re kicking off the BSR Conference 2017 in Huntington Beach, California. Over the next three days, we’ll hear compelling stories from changemakers at companies, foundations, governments, and other organizations who are taking the lead and embracing the need to redefine sustainable business for an era of profound change and political and economic volatility. 

It all starts tomorrow evening with opening remarks from BSR President and CEO Aron Cramer, followed by a keynote speech from Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. On Wednesday, we’ll hear from National Geographic Photographer Annie Griffiths and Microsoft’s Brad Smith, among many others. And Thursday we’ll feature a panel on Corporations and the Challenge of the Global Refugee Crisis, featuring TripAdvisor’s Stephen Kaufer, Mercy Corps’ Neal Keny-Guyer, and Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth’s Shamina Singh, as well as a presentation from Morgan Stanley’s Audrey Choi. We’ll close the Conference with a keynote address from Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards.

Whether you’re joining us in person or online, here are the best ways to follow along:

1. Catch the livestream.

We’ll broadcast our plenary sessions on Wednesday and Thursday in a live video feed. Visit the livestream registration page to sign up and join in.

2. Get social.

No matter your favorite social media platform, we’ll be there:

• Twitter: We’ll live tweet nearly the entire event from @BSRnews using the hashtag #BSR17. 
  
  
  
  
   
• Instagram: Follow our Instagram account, @bsrorg, for exclusive, behind-the-scenes looks at the Conference. Post your photos using #BSR17—and don’t forget to tag us!
  
  
   
• Find out more information and join in the conversation on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Flickr.

3. Ask questions. 

We’re opening up our plenary sessions for questions from Twitter—while you’re watching our livestream, ask our keynote speakers about their experiences using #BSR17.

4. Follow up.

We’ll have videos, wrap-ups, and other content available after the event, so be sure to visit the BSR blog, our YouTube channel, and the BSR Conference website.

Single-day passes are still available, so if you’re in the area, join us! Whether you’re with us in the plenary hall or participating virtually from your desk this week, we look forward to hearing your thoughts on #BSR17.