"Impact Certified"

This year, I signed up my business Reuben Digital Ltd to FuturePlus - a platform providing a complete sustainability and ESG solution. FuturePlus helps small to medium-sized businesses measure, manage and communicate their sustainability performance and growth.

But let’s back-track a bit.

We’ve been measuring and reducing our carbon footprint since 2022 but by late 2024, we recognised that being a truly sustainable company is about much more than reaching carbon net zero - it’s one of our key goals but being sustainable is about so much more than just our carbon footprint. Sustainable development relies on the three pillars of society, environment and economy working together. Instead of our company’s bottom line being only about profit, bringing sustainability into the mix gives you a Triple Bottom Line where People, Planet and Profit all need to be positively impacted.

We realised that we needed help broadening our focus purely from producing an annual Carbon Report . A fortuitous meeting with Elizabeth Corse at a Tech Zero event introduced us to the FuturePlus platform.

We did briefly consider a B Corp pathway but quickly discovered that it would take us a while to reach the threshold accreditation score to allow us to be assessed as a B Corp company – and you don’t get any help whilst you strive to reach the appropriate score.

FuturePlus, on the other hand, would give us our ‘right now’ score and an ‘ambition score’ that we can achieve over 3 years, all with practical advice on how to achieve each goal. We therefore decided that FuturePlus was a better fit because we’d be able to share and measure our journey from the start.

It only took us about a month from on-boarding to receive IMPACT CERTIFIED accreditation:

Our FuturePlus Actual score represents our positive impact right now, reflecting a measurement of our current achievements across the five key themes of Environment, Climate, Diversity and Inclusion, Economic, and Social.

We are provided with two scores because FuturePlus believe it is vital for current impact to be shown alongside future ambition.

Both scores are out of a total of 500. Each theme is scored out of a total of 100. Our scores are also broken down across the five themes to provide us with a transparent understanding of our impact and ambition in each area.

You can read more about the goals already achieved, as well as future goals in our FuturePlus report.

It’s just what we needed – a clear pathway of achievable steps within specific timeframes, that help us raise our ‘actual’ score towards our ‘ambition’ score. In our first three months, we’ve been investing a lot of time and effort to compile an array of staff policies and procedures into our first ever Staff Handbook! Doing this (and filling in any gaps) gives the Reuben team a clear sign that we are investing in them, valuing their contribution and providing them with a workplace fit for the 21st century! They are, after all, our most important ‘people’, referring back to that Triple Bottom Line analogy. Compliance in all areas from health and safety to cyber security is crucial to the smooth operation of Reuben Digital, and the key, I hope, to retaining a talented workforce.