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Measure What Matters: How to Win Loyal Members (Even in a Recession)

Dan Osusky on The Remarkable Credit Union

In this month’s episode, we’re excited to explore how your credit union can measure its impact in a meaningful way, and how doing so can help you win over new members and gain more loyalty from existing members.

We recorded this conversation back in early March, about a week before our world as we knew it was turned upside down by COVID-19. While we’ve been focusing on more urgent issues over the last few months, we don’t want to lose sight of the importance of measuring impact, particularly as we head into the 2021 planning season.

Between financial hardship, health concerns, racial strife, and a general atmosphere of fear and anxiety, your members and community need you more than ever. There’s great potential ROI for rigorous impact measurement, particularly during a recession when member loyalty and new member growth are all the more critical.

Dan Osusky, the Director of Standards at B Lab and creator of one of the world’s most comprehensive standards for impact, joins us to talk about how measurement illuminates our blind spots, what the business case is for impact, and how to create a roadmap to greater impact.

 

 

Key takeaways

  1. It’s important to look at impact holistically; otherwise, it can become a game of Whack-A-Mole.
  2. Measurement tells us things we don’t know. Why do we think we are already good? Most companies don’t hold themselves to clear standards when it comes to impact, and ambiguity leads to overconfidence.
  3. There’s a strong business case for measuring impact. Consumers are demanding it, and it unleashes the potential of your workforce.

Read the full transcript here:

Cameron Madill:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Credit Union podcast. We created our podcast to help credit union leaders think outside of the box about marketing technology and community impact. Each episode we bring on expert guests from inside and outside of the industry for conversations about innovation. Our goal is to challenge your preconceptions about business as usual, and provide you with actionable takeaways that you can use to grow your membership, improve the financial health of your cooperative and magnify the positive impact in your community. This episode features Dan Osusky, the director of standards at B Lab, which is the organization that created and provides the ongoing certification for B corporations around the world. He is the owner of two degrees in philosophy. He loves to surf and is originally from New Jersey, so that is some hardcore cold water surfing. Today’s big question. How can credit unions measure their impact in a meaningful way and use this to help win more loyalty from existing members and increase the number of new members?

Cameron Madill:
And before we begin just a heads up that we recorded this conversation back in early March, about a week before our world as we knew it was turned upside down by COVID-19. While we’ve been focusing on more urgent issues over the last few months, this topic is still worth exploring deeply. In fact, between financial hardship, health concerns, racial strife, and a general atmosphere of fear and anxiety, your members in your community need you’d more than ever. We’ve talked a lot in recent episodes about putting empathy into action, leading with compassion and doing the right thing. And while all of this sounds great, it’s very squishy if we don’t have any way to measure it. And as we’ll talk about in this episode, while credit unions have very rigorous standards for measuring their financial health, the standards for measuring impact tend to be quite ambiguous and that’s too bad because there’s great potential ROI for rigorous impact measurement, particularly during a recession when member loyalty and new member growth or all the more critical. So with all that said, let’s dive in. All right, Dan, I’d love to start with just at a high level, like who is B lab? Why do you exist? And what do you guys do?

Dan Osusky:
Yeah, absolutely. So we’re a nonprofit organization. We’re in fact, a global network of nonprofit organizations. And our objective as that network is to support people who are using business as a force for good, the ultimate aim in supporting those people, those individuals, those businesses is to essentially create a new economic system in which all businesses are competing to be the best for the world, rather than just the best in the world. And we do that through a few different mechanisms. The primary one that we’re most well known for is this corporate certification called B Corp Certification designed for leaders in this movement of using business as a force for good. We also then offer a few underlying tools, not just for B corps, but for all of those other businesses, consumers, and others who are inspired by the certified B corporations to actually follow in their footsteps and identify what are some real concrete actions that they can take to be more like that.

Cameron Madill:
And I get this question a lot. So I’d love to know your answer to it, of why should an organization measure their impact? Isn’t everyone already doing this?

Dan Osusky:
Yeah. There’s a few different parts to that. And I think sometimes the answer that people are looking for in a question like that is oriented towards how might this benefit my own organization or the business case for these types of efforts. How can this improve our profitability, reduce our costs, attract talent, attract consumers, et cetera. I think there’s a lot of really great information and data about all of those different topics. And I think that’s all quite valid. As you mentioned before, I’m coming from a philosophy background, particularly in ethics. And so I actually start from a very different standpoint, which is the reason that an organization should be doing this is because it’s the right thing to do. Undertaking real measurement efforts is really the only way that a company can identify what are the best ways for them to have the impact that they seek in the world.

Dan Osusky:
We are all moral agents. We might happen to work for businesses, but we want our businesses to be having a positive impact and not just benefiting ourselves. And so I think what’s most important around the idea of measurement is it’s telling you things that you don’t know. If it’s only reaffirming what you already believe about your company’s performance or how you’re doing, it’s not all that useful, but the key is to create measurement systems within an organization to actually create some real insights for you to then figure out how you can change that performance. And in response to, “Aren’t folks already doing this?” I think it depends on the audience that you’re actually looking at. There are about 3000 certified B corporations around the world. We’ve had close to 100,000 users of this assessment tool that we’ve created called the B Impact Assessment. In the grand scheme of things that’s a drop in the bucket of the overall business world. And while you might look at certain subsets of the business community, whether it’s large multinationals with sustainability reporting, mission driven organizations like credit unions and cooperatives, they probably all have some degree of measurement systems in place, but there’s no doubt there’s also incredible opportunities for them individually to figure out how they can accelerate their efforts, but then also to really attract and create opportunities for a lot more businesses who aren’t really thinking about this yet to begin their journey.

Cameron Madill:
I guess the audience should all know Dan is officially the hardest guest I’ve ever had to track down on the podcast. And I’ve heard like all these great things about him over the years. So I kept at it for all of you, so we know he’s a big deal. And I’ve heard lots of great things about just all the specific work that you’ve done to take this really nebulous thing of, of impact. I think, as you also said, kind of our moral way of showing up in the world and trying to turn it into something it’s not fuzzy and subjective, but it can actually be quantified. So I’d love to know what is special about B Lab’s approach compared to there are a lot of other options out there in some form or another to measure impact?

Dan Osusky:
Happy to answer that. I feel like I now have a lot more pressure on me for that for the rest of this conversation.

Cameron Madill:
That was the goal. I wanted to just like really lay it on.

Dan Osusky:
So I think there are a few things that make what we at B Lab do quite unique and special. The first is related to our certification in that we blend this idea of a rigorous standard that companies need to meet. That is, as you said, quite technical and quite quantified and quite rigorous with, you could say a sort of softer side of actually being a community based movement and organization. And so there are real efforts to ensure that companies who are certified B corporations are actually going through a rigorous certification, but then once you’ve achieved that certification, you’ve got this tremendous access to a group of like minded businesses that you can connect with, share experience with identify what are best practices and learn, and ultimately collectively try to accelerate this movement and really redefine what it means to be successful in business when it then comes to the actual rigor and detail of that certification and the underlying tool that is based on that’s called the B Impact Assessment that I mentioned before, what is probably most unique about it in comparison to a lot of other tools that exist out there is it is intended to be fully comprehensive and at the same time standardized and therefore comparable across businesses.

Dan Osusky:
And so there are a lot of certifications or specific standards that might exist out in the marketplace that are really focused on a particular issue. And what we’ve done is we tried to zoom out and actually look at a company in its entirety because the overarching principle behind that is otherwise this idea of impact measurement, and more importantly, there’s a sort of trend to move from measurement to impact management can become a bit of a game of whack-a-mole if you’re actually not taking a holistic comprehensive view. And that if you focus on one area, you might be allocating your resources away from other positive impact practices towards one particular area. But it’s actually impossible if you’re doing that to actually know how you’re doing on the whole. And so the B Impact Assessment takes this fully comprehensive view to ensure that we’ve actually got a 360 degree lens on a company’s practices and performance. And ultimately is not just something that is for the purposes of a certification and external credential, but as a real learning opportunity for the business as they go through this experience. And as they think about and identify areas for improvement.

Cameron Madill:
Yeah, I love that you said that I know PixelSpoke is a proudly certified B Corp, when we first certified, I thought it was all about kind of getting the badge, but ultimately for us, it’s become, I would say far more significant as a tool for ongoing engagement and improvement of our impact. And it’s sort of like part of what has made me so passionate about it is having this allows whoever owns impact or a category of impact and PixelSpoke to have that comprehensive perspective, almost like, it’d be like hiring a CFO, but not giving them access to the finances that even if you’ve delegated this to someone in your organization, just how hard this is, without something that can give you that broader view, it really resonates with me.

Cameron Madill:
And I’ve also got, which I actually had not told you, but there’s a small group, it’s a credit union impact collective that I’ve been running for about a year. And it’s a group of credit unions that some of them are using the B Impact Assessment. Some of whom are using something like the Global Alliance for Banking on Values, but I’d love to kind of hear for those who are interested in the B Impact Assessment, as you said, that there’s a lot more to this than just becoming a certified B corp though. That’s a wonderful thing. What are the different ways that people can use the B Impact Assessment if they’re maybe just intrigued and wanted to dip their toe into the water?

Dan Osusky:
Yeah, absolutely. So I guess the first is just a quick plug, which is it’s a free online public good. And so anyone who’s interested in accessing the tool can do so and can play around with it for free. And it’s very intentionally designed as an online tool to be and have this component of being a management platform and a management tool in addition to just a survey or an assessment. And so I would encourage everyone to think of it as sort of a survey on steroids. Once you have your own account, you’re able to go through and you’re essentially asked a series of questions that are intended to help you differentiate what are best practices within your own organization, and therefore be able to assess your performance. But at the same time, those questions are actually designed to really force the company to reflect on not just what they are currently doing, but what are their opportunities to improve what they’re doing.

Dan Osusky:
And that exists not only embedded within the questions themselves, but also the platform in its entirety. There are improvement reports in which you’re able to see how you can earn more points in different areas of the assessment. There are best practice examples where you can actually see what are other great companies doing, relate it to the questions that we’re asking as much as possible. There are also external resources and how to guides that are really designed to offer some tangible opportunities to learn about what are the steps you can take to improve these practices. And there’s even goal setting functionality in which you can target specific aspects of the questions, set yourself timelines and deadlines, on board different team members and things like that to actually get regular reminders and updates and hold yourself accountable to some of the improvements that you’re making. And so we see a number of companies who first sort of begin with the B Impact Assessment, really, as a means to an end, like you described it as getting through the BIA for the purposes of the certification.

Dan Osusky:
We also over our history as an organization, pretty rapidly learned that there were plenty of companies who were actually just using this to use it, whether it was at the request of investors or others, or just for their own educational purposes. And we’ve seen a range of different ways to engage with it from having a visionary CEO lead their small business through the process on the road for them to really identify what their strengths and opportunities are, to having internal sustainability teams or committees, or B leader teams collectively take ownership and go through this process. There have been some historic examples that have been pretty cool in which companies sort of open up the assessment to their entire staff for hack days in which they can sort of create small committees in different areas and really brainstorm what might be innovative ways to actually embed some of these ideas and practices from the assessment in the particular context of their business.

Cameron Madill:
I love that you just covered all that. Because I think it’s one of the big misconceptions and we just went through the assessment, I guess, six months ago for our recertification. And I was really impressed with all the improvements that have been made where, “Okay, we’re stuck here. We think we could be doing more,” but we don’t even… We’re not experts in this topic. We don’t know where to turn. And the number of times that there was a policy or an example or something that we could just really short circuit the process towards us, I think taking a really meaningful step forward is something that’s really powerful. And I sort of think of like the whole theme of what you’re saying is… Which is what I love about business, and it’s just extending our expertise and financial metrics to encompass this impact piece and saying, how do we benchmark it, figure out where the gaps are and then put it into our continuous improvement process.

Cameron Madill:
I do not have a philosophy degree, but I’ve spent probably too much of my life reading things like that. And I think ethics is too rarely invoked in business. And I think just your comment, how we’re all moral agents, that’s something that it always confused me about a lot of the people I met in business that there seemed to be this sense that because of the invisible hand and because we are quote, unquote, “Adding value that we don’t have to worry about,” how we’re showing up as moral agents in the world. And it was just sort of a great way to take a step forward on that. All right. So to go in a completely different direction, is it true that U.S. credit unions might soon be eligible for certified B corp status? Because as not for profits, they have not been eligible up until now.

Dan Osusky:
I feel like that’s the closest thing you have to a gotcha question.

Cameron Madill:
It’s a rumor I’ve heard.

Dan Osusky:
So let me actually first offer a little bit of background to where things currently stand. And I can’t give you a very definitive answer to that, but I can share some of the things that we’ve been exploring. The original intent and what has continued to apply throughout what we do with our certification is to apply eligibility for being a certified B corporation to this idea of being a for profit entity. That admittedly has been a really interesting learning experience for us, not only within the context of the U.S. and an experience like credit unions, actually having a nonprofit designation here, but also as we’ve expanded around the world to really recognize that there are very significant nuances in this idea of being a for-profit being a nonprofit, et cetera.

Dan Osusky:
And so just from a mission perspective and really to maintain what it means to be a certified B corporation, we’ve historically said that credit unions in the United States because of their nonprofit status are not eligible to be certified B corporations. There’s a second angle to that, which is one of the other key core components of being a certified B Corp is this idea of changing the company’s legal status to require the consideration of all stakeholders in their decision making, rather than just shareholders. And as we’ve engaged with some credit unions, we’ve also learned that there are some real significant barriers for credit unions because of their focus on a particular stakeholder, their members, to actually make that legal change. And so there’s both a philosophical here, which is as a certification for profit businesses, how does this apply to credit unions in the U.S., and then could credit unions actually meaningfully fulfill the requirements that we’ve set forward because of that idea of the legal change?

Dan Osusky:
Naturally, there’s quite a desire among some credit unions in the U.S. to pursue the certification. And what I’ll say is we’re nothing, if not a learning organization. And so based on some of that feedback and some of that desire, what we always want to make sure is that we feel like what we’re doing still is appropriate in the context of new information. And so we’ve engaged a pro bono law firm to do a more thorough review of credit unions and their nonprofit designation, their legal status, and their potential ability to fulfill our legal requirement. And once we received the results of that analysis, we’ll be able to determine whether in fact, the person that we’ve taken actually still holds, or perhaps it was based on either a changing regulatory landscape or just didn’t have it quite right. And therefore credit unions could potentially be eligible. And so long story short, the answer is, we’re not sure, but we’re exploring it.

Cameron Madill:
All right. Well, and I don’t know, is it a gotcha question if I provided it to you in advance? Maybe.

Dan Osusky:
No, I don’t think it is.

Cameron Madill:
I don’t think I’d be a very good investigative reporter. I think the coronavirus question was the gotcha.

Dan Osusky:
That’s the gotcha. Okay. Maybe you’ll have more maybe that’s in the rapid fire.

Cameron Madill:
Yeah. There’s other that I just didn’t share with you. So get ready. I’d love to hear, because this was one of my greatest areas of curiosity watching the assessment over, for us at PixelSpoke now over six years, evolve and change. And as you said, B Lab does an exceptional job of listening and learning because this is obviously not a static topic and there’s not going to be one definitive answer. So I’d love to know what are your learnings from building and evolving the assessments. I’m curious about everything from the major categories of impact, how do you choose to weigh someone’s carbon emissions compared to their living wage policy compared to whatever else and just all the other things that go into something that’s this complicated where you’re trying to allow it to adapt to any context, but still come down to a number that is universally meaningful?

Dan Osusky:
Yeah. These are really great questions and this is a half hour podcast, right? Because I could probably talk about each of these individually for hours on it. I’ll try to just tackle it through some of these individually and briefly. I’d encourage you to just ask more if you want to dive into some areas. So when it comes to the major categories of impact, the way the B Impact Assessment is structured is what we describe as a stakeholder based approach. And so it begins with a section that you can kind of consider an introduction that’s about the governance of the company and how it’s built ethically and to manage its impact on its stakeholders. And then each subtopic after that governance section is organized by who is the stakeholder being affected. And so it goes from workers to community members, to the environment and then customers, that’s the approach that we’ve taken because we found that level of insight on specific stakeholder performance is really valuable, but it’s also worth acknowledging that there’s actually not quite a definitive way to approach these things.

Dan Osusky:
People are probably familiar with the concept of E, S, and G, environmental social, governance. That would be a different way to frame these categories of impact. Within each of our sections, however, with that stakeholder focus, what we’re then able to do is dive down into subsections that are essentially what are the issues or the topics that matter, or are most relevant to the stakeholder that we’re being asked about. And so I think a really good example of that is in the worker section, which is quite broadly, essentially a measure of job quality. We’ve broken it down into four subsections that we think are essentially the four key elements of a quality job. And it begins with financial security. It goes on to career development opportunities, to ultimately what amounts to health and safety and wellbeing, and then engagement and satisfaction, which is a little bit more oriented towards things like worker voice and the culture of an organization.

Dan Osusky:
So at the highest level, you’ve got the stakeholder that we identified that matters that we want to measure performance against. And then we’ve got the key issues that are underlying that. Then onto how do we actually go about weighting these different areas? Admittedly, this type of conversation is more an art than a science. We are ultimately within our assessment and our scoring system, making values judgments and values judgments are going to largely vary by particular individuals. And so the key element of how we actually go about doing that is first and foremost, we don’t decide that ourselves. All of the content of the assessment in particular, the weightings are actually driven by our independent standards advisory council, which is a group of people who make all of these big decisions and therefore serve as independent stewards of the B corp movement and the content of the B Impact Assessment that is quite largely built off of the incredible amounts of feedback that we receive, not only from our users of the tool, but also from our proactive engagement with other stakeholders.

Dan Osusky:
And so we look to, if not formally partner at least have a really robust conversations with different organizations, with expertise on specific areas, whether it’s related to climate change and climate action for businesses or equity, diversity, inclusion issues and all other topics as well. And then what we essentially do is try to aggregate these up with a sense towards how do these topics get materially affected by a particular context of a business. And so we do customize all of this by size, sector, and geographic market of those organizations and then make those tough judgment calls around how we weight them relative to one another, to create that comprehensive story at the top of a company’s overall performance. That I think feeds well into the idea of us as a learning organization. I think one of the things that we always say is the first thing we know about the assessment is that it’s wrong or that is imperfect.

Dan Osusky:
And the topics that we’re always exploring or are themselves constantly evolving. And so we’ve created regular mechanisms in which we’re updating all of the content of our standard and the assessment that used to be a two year process. We actually shifted it over to a three year process to really allow for more in depth development and some continuity over time. But that’s all based on a team here that’s conducting research, conducting stakeholder engagement, both proactively and reactively as we’re receiving feedback from all the folks who would like to provide feedback to us. For some context, there, we’ve run some numbers on the feedback that we receive within our assessment platform alone last year in 2019. And it was over 3000 pieces of feedback. And so we’re getting that amount of feedback every year that we’re reviewing, collating, seeing where there are trends and hotspots and then conducting research engagement with our standards advisory council and other groups to really identify what are the real improvements that we can make through them.

Cameron Madill:
Yeah. It’s both an impressive and not surprising fact that you got 3000 pieces of feedback given the amount of passion I’ve seen in the community, as I’m sure you’re used to hearing from everyone. I want to circle back to something because I think it’s an incredible tool. And of course I respect and probably resonate with the sort of philosophical, moral framing of the case for impact. But I know you must be a research and data guy, obviously at the heart of this, can you actually summarize what is the business case for doing this? Because I think that’s interesting to balance out just the kind of it’s the right thing to do approach.

Dan Osusky:
Yeah. So first off the assessment actually features some resources within individual questions that talk about how performance on any individual question might actually drive some of these business case questions. And so there’s both, I think a big picture answer to this, which is why measure impact, why care about purpose, et cetera. But then there can also be some really like detailed questions around, “Well, what does that mean for when I think about using renewable energy or providing benefits to my employees?” I’ll try to kind of bridge the gap between the two, but at the highest level. And you’ve probably experienced this being a B Corp and seeing it within the community. One of the main drivers we see for this effort to really embed purpose and impact within an organization. And that again, I think by necessity kind of means some real measurement and verification of it through the assessment through certification, et cetera, is either because there’s a demand to do so from key stakeholders, including a company’s own workers, or even if there’s not that explicit demand, a business is able to see the real opportunity that exists by embedding these metrics in this purpose, into their organization, to not only to attract and retain, but really engage their workers.

Dan Osusky:
And so the experience that we’ve seen is the ability to actually create an excited workforce and group of individuals who are passionate about your organization is really unleashed by this idea of proving out what your purpose and what your mission is through robust measurement mechanisms and third party verification like being a B Corp.

Cameron Madill:
Good answer. I just wanted to make sure we touched on that because I think it is such an interesting, complicated, nuanced thing. And also there’s a really basic business case and you’re right, like, I would say here at PixelSpoke, we had seen some benefits, I think from a marketing sales standpoint of when people get it, they’re like, “Wow, you guys are really committed to walking the walk, imperfect, like all of us, but you’ve really invested in this a lot.” And I would say far and away, the biggest benefit for us has been what you said, just kind of unleashing more of the full potential of our workforce, which is obviously just an incredible competitive advantage. I’d like to pivot back to maybe a little more of the philosophy. So one thing you may or may not know, Dan is we just went through at the beginning of January, we converted PixelSpoke to be a worker owned cooperative, which has been a really interesting and exciting journey.

Cameron Madill:
And part of this journey was we met a bunch of other worker cooperatives. We met a couple that were struggling, but most of them were doing really well, were doing great things. And one of our learnings is including things that people warned us was that this model does not magically turn you into a great organization, that there are worker cooperatives that do not do good work. There are worker cooperatives that do not treat their workers well and believe it or not, there are worker cooperatives that are really struggling financially. And so it allowed us to think about just what are the strengths and weaknesses of different models. And the reason I bring this up is that one of the things we heard a lot is that one of the weaknesses of worker cooperatives is that they can be a little bit myopic. And so they’re really focused for obvious reasons on their workers and this results in a lot of the stuff you talked about in the B Impact Assessment of what makes a great job.

Cameron Madill:
So they’re workplaces that do a lot of things really well for their workers, but they lose their focus on customer value. They lose their focus often on kind of environmental goals. And so kind of being aware of any particular model has its natural strengths and weaknesses. And of course I’m totally biased. I think credit unions are a really great force for good in the world. And I think a generic credit union is better than a generic community bank by quite a bit because I think their model as consumer cooperatives leads to lots of really positive things. And of course, I’m asking this question that I think it can also lead to maybe that turning into the ceiling of the potential for that organization rather than saying that that’s just the starting point. So I would love to hear your thoughts about… This goes back to you where you opened with, “We are all moral agents in the world.” So why is it that businesses organizations tend to think, “We got this,” when it comes to impact sort of like most humans, we all tend to think we’re good people. So why is there that blind spot in organizations and in business particular?

Dan Osusky:
That’s a really great question. I think the place that I would start, in our response to that, is actually because of this, whether it’s a false presumption or not, of these topics are a little bit more ambiguous and gray than what might be true on the financial side of how you measure a company’s performance, right? Like there’s a really easy when you want to understand how well is a business doing. If you’re talking about financial performance, you’ve got an accounting system, you’ve got your numbers and you can easily look at that. That accounting system that’s been developed for the business world has taken hundreds of years to actually evolve to where it is right now. But if you look at the side of impact that hasn’t happened yet, and there’s efforts that like ours, where we’re quantifying something through a B Impact Assessment, there are a number of other really great efforts that are happening to actually try to create accounting systems around a lot of these things.

Dan Osusky:
But I think both the proliferation of different approaches to that, as well as what I see as some real inherent challenges to that idea of how do we convert this type of value into something that is that robust and rigorous and quantified, I think creates space for a business leader or individual businesses or others to sort of fill in that gap with their own assumptions about their own performance. And I think this also goes back to this comment about measuring impact, managing impact, sometimes being a game of whack-a-mole, if you don’t take that holistic perspective, where something like the B Impact Assessment actually forces you to grapple with that 360 degree view. So you can really see that laid bare for your organization. And we’ve had, I can think of a number of examples off the top of my head.

Dan Osusky:
I won’t share anything too specific of organizations who come through and are pursuing the B Corp certification and have a real focus and strength on a single passion, on a single issue area. And they will perform well on whatever that issue area is. But the assessment process, the certification actually serves as an eyeopening opportunity to widen their lens and really see what those other potential trade offs are and how they can actually build out something that works for all stakeholders, because that’s the underlying principles of the assessment and the certification. And so it’s really interesting sometimes to see companies who come in with a particular social mission and then begin to really grapple with their environmental footprint or vice versa, because I think we’ve seen examples of both.

Cameron Madill:
So, I feel like, can I summarize that as in effect maybe ambiguity or lack of clear feedback on our impact performance leads to overconfidence?

Dan Osusky:
I think that’s fair. Yeah.

Cameron Madill:
All right. So I want to make sure we get to the rapid fire questions so I can ask you about your favorite ice cream and things like that. But I have one other question that I think is really interesting because you just touched on it as far as standards around impact, it’s just such an exciting and new and rapidly evolving space. The UN has its own effort around these 17 sustainable development goals or SDGs as the acronym of the moment seems to be, and you guys have done some really exciting work, which amazingly was a development project that finished on time, which also just kind of blew my mind given how often those things seem to run a lot behind schedule.

Dan Osusky:
It wasn’t easy to get there, but we-

Cameron Madill:
I cannot imagine it was, no, I was very impressed. So I’d love to know about the UN sustainable development goals, how they connect to B Impact Assessment and the new tool you’ve built. And how is that relevant to organizations that are not B corps, maybe don’t want to become B corps, maybe aren’t eligible. What’s the opportunity there?

Dan Osusky:
First off the sustainable development goals, there’s 17 of them. And they’re essentially a framework that was developed through the UN with essentially all states and other stakeholders involved in setting an agenda for sustainable development for our world through 2030. I think it’s always important to give that high level description, at least in the context of the United States where I think the sustainable development goals are a little less well known, but the really exciting thing about what the SDGs offer particularly for businesses, because there was a really key effort to really think about what can business action be to contribute to them, is the fact that this is essentially global standard for what is the world that we want to live in. And so it’s creating this really amazing galvanizing force where we can feel like there’s collective unity around what we’d all like to achieve.

Dan Osusky:
And then the big question exists around will then how do we actually get there? And the unfortunate news is they were developed, I think at this point, 5 years ago, well, the world is not on track to achieve them. And there’s perhaps a lot of reasons for that in part because they’re actually really ambitious. But another reason is particularly when we moved to a specific stakeholder group, like the business community, there’s a lot of challenges and actually translating those SDGs to what can be real concrete business action to get there. And so our exploration on this topic really began with this galvanizing force that now exists and with what we’ve historically offered to the business community, including the certification in the B Impact Assessment, how can we help accelerate these efforts? And we had the opportunity to partner with the United Nations Global Compact and their principles based approach and their content expertise, along with our expertise on developing educational and reflective assessment tools to develop this product called the SDG Action Manager that essentially sits alongside the B Impact Assessment, and it converts the content of that B Impact Assessment platform to be specifically how a business can be taking action and measure their performance on those 17 sustainable development goals individually and collectively.

Dan Osusky:
And so what that does is always recognizing that the B corp certification is sort of that third party, external independent mark for a company that is a true leader in this movement. And the tools that we offer that underlie that certification enable really any business who might be inspired by those types of B corps or inspired by the sustainable development goals, to really figure out where it is that they can go, whether they’re already themselves considered a leader, or like you said, they’re just sort of getting their feet wet on this topic. And so as that free public good in the same way, the B Impact Assessment is available. The SDG Action Manager is a place where any business who hears about the SDGs is curious about what that means for their business is able to go through and see a series of questions to get themselves a baseline of what their current performance is, learn about what SDGs actually matter most to their business, and so it provides recommendations on where to focus, and then it allows those companies to then dive into those focus areas and think about how their business model can be contributing to it, how their own operations, how their supply chain and how they can engage in collective action to support them as well.

Dan Osusky:
And so we’re really excited to be able to offer that it just launched last month and we’ve got 10 years to achieve the STGs. And we hope that this is doing at least a minor part to help really put a dent in them and contribute to them.

Cameron Madill:
Yeah, really exciting and fantastic work. All right. You ready for the rapid fire questions?

Dan Osusky:
I tend to be long winded as you can probably hear. So I don’t know how rapid fire I can make them up, but I’ll try.

Cameron Madill:
We’ll see how it goes. Favorite ice cream?

Dan Osusky:
Weirdly coffee ice cream, even though I don’t drink coffee.

Cameron Madill:
If you had to wear a tee shirt with one word on it every day for the next year, what would that word be?

Dan Osusky:
Think.

Cameron Madill:
All right. What is the song you’re most embarrassed to admit you like?

Dan Osusky:
I’m a huge fan of Whitney Houston. I’m going to go with, How Will I Know.

Cameron Madill:
Beautiful. What’s in the trunk of your car right now? Don’t say a dead body. No one’s ever said that.

Dan Osusky:
I won’t say that. My answer is kind of interesting. It’s a bow. I’ve been trying to learn archery.

Cameron Madill:
It’s a bow? That is very cool. If you could have dinner with one historical person, who would it be?

Dan Osusky:
[Gota 00:33:54].

Cameron Madill:
All right. And the question we’ve all been dying to know boxers or briefs?

Dan Osusky:
I wear boxer briefs.

Cameron Madill:
Split in the middle, all right, you’re a moderate.

Dan Osusky:
Yeah.

Cameron Madill:
I’ve always wanted to ask that question on a podcast or anywhere. I’ve never asked it before. Cool, great conversation. I loved hearing all your wisdom and perspective. Is there anything you didn’t get to or anything you’d like to reiterate for our audience?

Dan Osusky:
I think my concluding thoughts, or where I usually in these types of conversations is to sort of reiterate the fact that we see ourselves as a learning organization. And there’s a lot of things that I’ve shared about what our current viewpoint is, but even those viewpoints are constantly evolving and we love to hear feedback, and we recognize that both our organization, our assessment, and frankly, the world has changed really dramatically since we’ve begun doing this. And so our goal is to always stay at the forefront of what are the things that we need to be doing to collectively optimize the impact of our community and the rest of the business world. And so both love to have folks engage with our tools to really think about how they can improve, but also always really welcome input in terms of how we can improve as well. So thank you.

Cameron Madill:
All right, Dan, thanks so much for joining us today.

Dan Osusky:
Absolutely.

Cameron Madill:
All right, folks, another great episode. I really enjoyed speaking with Dan. Obviously one of my favorite topics. A few of my key takeaways, I was first struck by Dan’s comment that measurement tells us things that we don’t know. That that’s one of the fundamental goals, it’s not to get a badge. It’s not to compare ourselves necessarily to others is to just tell us what we don’t know about our organizations. It’s a tool for out where the gaps are.

Cameron Madill:
I thought Dan’s point, I sort of forget this actually that the B Impact Assessment tool is completely free. There’s over 100,000 organizations using it, and it’s not just a tool for measuring impact, but for every question, there are lots of best practices and resources to help us all improve our impact in the world. A lot of what makes B corp unique is a combination of multiple things. So that it’s both the certification, the assessment tool, which we talked about mostly in the podcast, but also as Dan said, it’s a community and more broadly it’s a movement. And then that power of peers is something that really matters for all of us in the work that we do. I was also struck by Dan’s comment that impact work can be kind of a whack-a-mole type thing if we don’t look at it holistically, because it’s just so big and it’s so broad, and that’s another one of the benefits of having a single standard that we’re using.

Cameron Madill:
I liked hearing Dan’s response to my question of why do we tend to think we’re already good? Why do we think that we don’t necessarily have improvement in this area? And I thought it was a really simple framing that in the financial space we have standards. It’s just we know what the generally accepted accounting practices are and that’s all there is to it. I know it’s a little more complicated than that, but it’s just such a well standardized thing, but in impact we don’t, and we’re kind of in like the first inning of this whole game. And then that ambiguity leads to overconfidence and blind spots. I liked highlighting the UN sustainable development goals, the SDGs. One thing that Dan didn’t necessarily mention, but like entire countries are organizing their efforts around the SDGs. And so I think that’s really exciting that that’s now something that we all can access as organizations through the B corp platform.

Cameron Madill:
And then lastly, just highlighting the business case for impact, because I think for any of us, there is absolutely a moral imperative. As Dan talked about, to try to do the right thing and improve how we show up in the world. And if we can’t justify it from a financial standpoint, we don’t get very far. And so I think just highlighting that from a business standpoint, this is something that consumers are no longer just requesting. They’re actually starting to expect it, demand it, and that it really truly unleashes the potential of your workforce through all those tools that they have. All right. Thanks for joining us today for another great episode, until the next time. I wish you all the best of luck in making your credit union remarkable.