About CSRHub

 

What is CSRHub?

CSRHub is a web based tool that provides access to employee, environmental, community and governance ratings on most major companies in North America, Europe and Asia. We are the first company to combine data from 10 of the premier socially responsible investment (SRI) analysis firms (also known as Environment, Social, Governance - ESG), and over 600 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), government agencies, news feeds, social networking groups, smaller for-profit organizations, and publishers. Our proprietary tools combine more than loading... pieces of data on sustainability and CSR performance into a consistent set of ratings. We then allow users to personalize these ratings and  share them. Our site enables users to learn about and compare company sustainability and CSR behavior. We provide some ratings information for free and additional information to fee-paying subscribers.

Who Started CSRHub?

Our three co-founders are Cynthia Figge, Bahar Gidwani, and Stephen Filler. We have worked for more than ten years on this project. Cynthia Figge, President and CEO, cofounded one of the first consultancies integrating sustainability and corporate strategy in 1996, and brings many years of experience tracking corporate responsibility. Previously Cynthia developed new services for McCaw Cellular/LIN Broadcasting. Bahar Gidwani, CTO, has built and run Web-based and technology-based businesses. Bahar worked on Wall Street with Kidder, Peabody, and with McKinsey & Co. Bahar has consulted to a number of major companies and currently serves on the board of several software and Web companies. Co-founder and Advisor Stephen Filler is an attorney who specializes in intellectual property and business law, and is currently Director of Business Development for a solar energy company. Cynthia and Bahar both hold Harvard MBAs and Bahar is also a CFA.

What is CSRHub's goal and purpose?

There has been no easy way for consumers and businesses to discover how companies perform and compare on sustainability and CSR issues. This makes it hard for people to make socially responsible decisions about what to buy, where to work, whom to do business with, and which companies to support or not support. CSRHub brings leading information about corporate social performance into one place so business managers, professionals, researchers, academics, NGOs, online publications, social networking sites, and individuals can use CSRHub’s information to understand, share, discuss, and track the CSR and sustainability performance of companies.

Why did you choose the name CSRHub and spell it as one word, rather than as CSR Hub?

We considered many names for our site—in fact we spent a year and a half under a different name—EkoHub. From the beginning, we liked the word “Hub” as we felt it reflected our desire to be at the center of the CSR and sustainability area. Our first prefix of “Eko” is related to both economy and ecology. However, many people tried to spell it “eco” and got confused. We considered ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) and several other similar terms from the reporting space. We considered separating our name into two parts, but we wanted to indicate that we were taking an integrative and holistic approach. We considered either having the first part, the second part, or the last two letters in lower case. But, we felt that all parts of what we do—and all the communities we serve—were equal. We decided to change our capitalization to CSRHub, so that people don’t think our name rhymes with “shrub!” We also operate under the name ESGHub, and have the URL www.esghub.com.

Company Information

 

Why are some companies missing from CSRHub?

As we continue to expand our loading... data sources, we plan to expand our coverage of publicly-traded, private companies, government organizations, and not-for-profits. Each company must meet certain criteria to be included in our database. We drop companies when we do not have enough information. We currently do not rate about loading... companies for whom we do not have enough information. See more on our Ratings methodology page.

How CSRHub handle multi-nationals?

Which country are they considered to belong to? In general, we try to assign multi-nationals to the country in which their headquarter is located. Some companies maintain two or more head offices in different countries. In these cases, we try to use the office location that was first established.

How does CSRHub handle companies that use flag of convenience countries as their domicile?

Certain countries have tax and other regulations that make them attractive headquarter locations. In general, we assign companies to their official legal location.

Do parent corporations get credit for subsidiaries ratings on CSRHub?

We generally do not “credit” a parent corporation with the sustainability-related activities of its subsidiaries. The parent-subsidiary issue is an important one in sustainability policy and practice. Subsidiaries often have dramatically different positions and performance on social issues from their parent company. In some cases, these differences are driven by history (an acquired company may seek to maintain its old management style), local customs (different countries have different CSR requirements), or by a corporate “laissez faire” approach to social standards. Further, some organizations may only allow a parent to join or to submit information, or may require that a company’s be headquartered in a certain geography.

What info is available about the year a company first introduced corporate CSR initiatives? (of any kind) at corporate level?

The best source for learning the exact dates that companies issued social responsibility reports is Corporate Register. They are one of our sources, but all we receive from them is an indication of how many times each company has reported. (As a subscriber, you can see this number for companies that are in Corporate Register’s system.) Since companies sometimes report more than once per year or skip years, this number is not an accurate way of estimating how long they have reported.

Do the organizations I belong to support CSRHub?

A large number of organizations plan to support CSRHub. Do a profile search for your organization’s name, and see if it appears on the search results list. If it does not, please ask the head of your organization to contact us at https://www.csrhub.com/partnership-request. We will respond with details on our partnership program. An organization that does not want to join us as a partner can still create a “group profile” for its members. However, it will not have the ability to establish and maintain a forum for its members.

Are the sources listed on a company page generic or specific to the company?

The sources listed on a company page (the detailed page shown with all the ratings after a search) are for the specific company at a specific time. As a pro subscriber, you may "rollback" ratings to see the ratings and sources change over time for the specific company. See more under Ratings on this page.

How do you update the data in case of M&A or the company changes its name?

We manage these changes in several ways.

  1. Company out of business (or sold). We keep the data on the company in our system for approximately two years. This is because we continue to get reports on the business, even after it is gone. Plus, our users continue to want to do benchmarks and comparisons with defunct/gone companies. We also see users wanting to back test and some specifically want to study companies that were sold or went bust.
  2. Company merged with another. We decide which of the two companies will be the official “predecessor.” We give that company’s internal ID to the successor. That means that charts and other continuous change information on the successor will be tied to the chosen predecessor. We then keep the other company (the one we didn’t select to continue) as though it was a defunct company (see above).
  3. Company splits into two parts. We decide which of the two parts will be the official “successor.” We give it the internal ID of the original company. We make a new entry for the new entity.
  4. Company changes its name or reorganizes in a way less than the above. We keep the old name as an alternate spelling in our lookup database.

    We keep four dates on each company: Date Added to the file, Date Included in ratings, Date Updated with new information, Date Removed from ratings. We keep three dates on each data source (for each company): Date added, Date removed, and Date updated.
What differentiates CSRHub from your competitors?

We combine the opinions of more than loading... sources into a streamlined, consistent, stable set of consensus ratings. We cover more companies and have more data history than other sources.

CSRHub Dashboard

 

The CSRHub Official Name comes up as NA, but I'm sure you must rate this company.

Sometimes variations in the names of companies or ticker symbols creates ambiguities that our name lookup can’t resolve. As a human being, you are smarter than our program. So, you can use our lookup tool to find the company you seek. Click on the cell in column B that contains the company name we are not understanding. Go to the top menu bar on Excel and look for the CSRHub menu item. Click on it and use the leftmost button—the one called “Company.” You will see a pop up box that has a search field at the top. Type in the first few letters of the company name you are looking for. Our system will search through all of the names in our system and find you a list of the ones that match. When you see what you want, click on it and then hit the “Paste into the current cell” button. We’ll paste in a name that should give you the ratings information you want.

You can also use the additional options to determine a company on the first page of our dashboards. You can now enter a company ticker or ISIN # to help choose the correct company.

Why does it take so long to recalculate my sheet?

Excel is pulling data from the CSRHub database and putting it into your Dashboard sheets. The more data you request, the more times your program has to call the database. This is one reason we have limited the number of companies in our templates. If you want to dig into just one aspect of sustainability, you should build a custom sheet of your own that looks at just the factors you want. You may also find that Dashboards calculate much faster after the first pass. So you should be able to make a change and have almost instant recalculations. This is because our code tries to only recalculate the cells that have changed.

Can I use CSRHub's dashboards on my Mac?
Yes, make sure you have the most recently updated version of excel. Also, go to “Formulas” in the menu bar, under “Calculations” and click on "Manual." After inputting our companies, use Shift  +  F9 to recalculate.
My Dashboard doesn't want to recalculate.

Excel sometimes doesn’t understand that you want to refresh your entire sheet. If this happens, try pressing the Ctrl, Alt, and F9 keys (on a Windows machine) or Shift  +  F9 (on a Mac). This forces Excel to recalculate all of the cells of a spreadsheet.

What do each of the tools in the CSRHub tab in the menu bar do?

Start at second 37 of our CSRHub Bulk Extract Tool video for an introduction to our CSRHub menu options in excel.

Could you tell me the easiest way to export percentile rankings within a specific industry? For example, how Walmart compares to just other companies in the Retail industry, for example.

If you look on the Top Level Scores sheet, you’ll see in column J “Percentile Ranks Vs Industry”. The
formula used is =CSRHubRatioIndustry(<Company Name>,<Industry>). There are also formulae for
doing ratios at the Category and Subcategory level:
=CSRHubRatioCategoryIndustry($A12,$D12)
=CSRHubRatioSubcategoryIndustry($A12,$D12)
In general, if you can see it on the company page, there is a formula for it. That is because the company
page is built using our API and these fields are available via the API.

I see in the CSRHub tab that there is an “industry group” function which makes me think this is possible, but when I click on “Choose Fields on this Sheet” I get the error below. Can you please tell me how to fix this, or if there’s an easier way for me to get the industry group for these companies?

I think you have crossed up between two different systems. I think you are using the left three buttons (which control bulk Dashboard use) when you are inside a regular Dashboard sheet. The left three buttons only work when you have created a bulk Dashboard sheet (the leftmost button does this). You can call industry into your regular sheet using the industry functions. There is an example of this on the Enter Name and Overall Ratings sheets. Or, you can move to the bulk Dashboard sheet (by creating one), bring in your company names (into column B) and then pick whatever you need from the menu you were trying to open with the second button.

What if I have questions that have not been addressed here?

We are continually working to improve our Dashboards and user resources. If you cannot find your Dashboard question answered here, we encourage you to explore our CSRHub Dashboard Video How- To page, which has 10 videos walking through various dashboards and steps. Also, download our Dashboard Tips PDF for advice and steps on downloading and using our dashboards.

Help us improve our FAQ page by sending any additional questions or clarification to: (INSERT EMAIL OR LINK).

 

 

CSRHub ESG Alerts

How do I set up an Alert?

Use the “Look for a Company” search box in the top right of our menu to find the company you want to set up an Alert for. Go to the company page and click the “Track this company’s changes” orange button on the top of the page, fill out the form on the right-hand side, and go through checkout to receive Alerts.

 

What companies can I set up an Alert for?

You can set up an Alert for any of the loading... companies we fully rate. We don’t offer Alerts on partially rated or non-rated companies because we cannot give you a complete report.

 

What does the CSRHub Basic ESG Alert contain?

The CSRHub Basic ESG Alert contains the ESG rating change and report of your specified company over the last month or past 3 months, as well as the average ESG changes in the company’s industry and country for comparison.

What does the CSRHub Advanced ESG Alert contain?

The CSRHub Advanced ESG Alert contains the ESG rating change and report of up to five specified companies over the past month, 3 months, or year (for a longer-term perspective). In addition to the company's overall score, the Advanced Alert also allows users to see performance changes in the company's industry, country, and the 4 CSRHub Categories: Community, Employees, Environment, and Governance.

What is the subscription cost for the ESG Alerts?

An Alert for a company is $loading...  a month, if you want to sign up for multiple Alerts, consider our CSRHub Advanced ESG Alert option at $loading...  per month, which allows you an Alert for 5 companies.

 

How often will I receive an Alert?

Both CSRHub’s Basic ESG Alert and CSRHub’s Advanced ESG Alert can give you monthly updates.

How often will I be charged for an Alert?

All Alerts are set to auto-renew each month on or around the day of the month you purchased them originally.

How do I receive my Alerts?

You will receive Alerts via email. The Alert can also be viewed on the CSRHub website on your account page.

Can I share my Alerts with my team or company?

You may share the Alert PDF internally with members of your team. You may not distribute an Alert report externally and you have no rights to sell this report or the data in it. Please see our Terms of Use page for full terms and services.

The company I want to set up an Alert for is not showing up. Why?

If a company is not showing up in the “choose company” section of the alert form, that means it is not fully rated yet. (It may be either partially rated or not rated yet, at all.) We cannot offer Alerts on companies that don’t have overall ratings, because we cannot provide a complete enough report to satisfy simple tracking needs. A company is fully rated when the entity has enough ratings sources (and those sources provide enough rating information) to allow us to estimate a rating within one point at a 95% confidence level. As we continue to increase our sources of data, more entities will become fully rated and available for an Alert.

Can I get a refund on an Alert product?

The price for Alert products is low and they are delivered directly to you, as soon as you buy one. Therefore, we do not offer refunds on Alert products.

How do I stop my Alerts?

You may cancel your Alert by going to My Account, My Alert Settings, choosing the Alert you want to cancel and clicking “Cancel” to the right of it.

ESG Ratings Lever

What is CSRHub’s ESG Ratings Lever?

CSRHub’s ESG Ratings Lever app provides a roadmap for company ratings improvement. The Lever tracks changes in a company’s data sources’ ratings, weight, and importance over time. Subscribers can change the comparison timeframe and drill down to see how the data source elements are driving their scores.

Why can something change in the quadrant when nothing new is reported?

If there are changes in the quadrant without any new reports, it's likely because the sources influencing that quadrant have made updates to their data.

What does it mean when the rating of a source changes?

Sources periodically update their view of how an entity is performing.  They may give the entity higher or lower ratings, or they may stay the same.  The colors on sources show if they are moving down (red), up (green), or staying the same (clear shading) relative to the other sources.  If several sources update their rating at the same time, an entity may move generally in a certain direction.  When this happens, a source that moves in the same direction as the others may remain with a clear shading.

What is the drilldown feature?

When a user clicks on a source, they will experience a "drilldown" similar to the one available on our website under the "looking glass." However, this drilldown will exclusively display elements related to the selected source, excluding other source elements.

What effect does adding or removing a source have?

Adding a new high rating source should help improve an entity’s ratings.  Losing an old negative source could also improve ratings.  The Lever shows where sources “enter” the grid and show where they last sat (at the start of the comparison period) when they are no longer affecting current scores.

What does it mean when the importance changes?

A change in importance generally signifies that more elements have been added that influence the ratings, or that other sources have been added, removed, or have adjusted their content based on new or updated data.

How can membership in an organization lead to lower performance?

The ratings impact of an organization depends upon the ratings of members and the commitment it requires from them.  Sometimes an entity may be doing much better than the other members of an organization.  If this happens, the organization will have a small negative effect on the entity’s rating.  Conversely, If the other entities in an organization have ratings higher than those of the entity in an area, membership in the organization may help improve the entity’s ratings.

How can I enhance my company's rating? Is there a consultant I can speak to for assistance?

CSRHub is offering consulting services and can recommend consulting firm partners. Request a consultation, here.

Are there options for users to view their sources in different ways within the ESG Ratings Lever automated product?

Yes, users can examine their sources in various ways, including an overall view, by category, or by subcategory, offering flexibility in source analysis.

How does this product enhance benchmarking?

Users can analyze their own source patterns, compare them to their peers, make informed decisions about engagement, and identify and rectify any errors or omissions.

Data Sources

 

What types of data sources does CSRHub use?

We use data from Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) - also known as Environment, Social, Governance (ESG) analysis firms, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) such as foundations, associations, union groups, and activist groups, government databases, publications and research reports, and input from individual CSRHub users. You can see a full list of our sources on our Data Sources page here. You can click through to learn more about each source from this page, or click on the source icon on any company page that you visit.

Who are CSRHub major SRI/ESG data sources?

Our major ESG sources include S&P Global,  Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), MSCI (ESG Intangible Value Assessment, ESG Impact Monitor, and ESG Carbon Metrics), Trucost ESG Analysis, Ideal Ratings, Arabesque S-Ray, Covalence, and Vigeo EIRIS.

What can I do with CSRHub's data?

Data can be used to make socially responsible decisions about what to buy, where to work, whom to do business with, and which companies to support or not support. When you joined our site, you agreed to our terms of use. Please take another look at them, if you need additional guidance on this subject found on our legal page here.

How does CSRHub weight each data source to derive our consensus scores?

There is a simple answer and a complex one. The simple answer is that there are two drivers: sources with more data get more weight and those that are more aligned with consensus get more weight. The more complex answer is that our system attempts to correlate each element from each source with the elements from all other sources. It does this across all of the entities we rate. We believe this process gives more weight to sources and elements that are more aligned with consensus. If a source doesn’t cover many entities, it can still have a fairly large weight if it has a uniformly positive or negative signal. If a source has many elements and covers many entities, it may have more weight in general than smaller sources, but its “signal” can be blurred because each element follows a different pattern.

Should I use CSRHub data for making investment decisions?

We built CSRHub to improve access to sustainability data for corporate managers, researchers, activists, and those involved in non-governmental organizations. Investors now also use our data for ESG (environment, social, governance) analysis and decision-making. While CSRHub ratings are not "real time"- we update our information about once per month - we offer a twelve year data history, extremely broad coverage of both equity and debt issuing entities, and consistent scores across more than loading... countries and more than loading... industries. Our aggregated information gives a consensus view of ESG performance that investors can compare with their own views and tie to specific trends, investment themes, or client needs. We allow our users to create lists of companies. However, we do not provide any share prices, investment return tracking, or investment performance analysis. Of course, good investment decisions should always be based on considerations besides ESG factors such as the past and expected future financial performance of a company, considerations of risk, and a client’s need for diversification.

How reliable is the data CSRHub uses?

We find that our sources do not always agree with one another. However, in general, a company that ranks poorly on a certain aspect of social performance with one source will also rank poorly with other sources. Thanks to the large number of sources we use and the proprietary methods we use to process and adjust our data, we believe we capture most of the information our sources provide. As a result, our ratings are at least representative of the general state of knowledge about the social performance of the companies in our database and may represent the best-available information. Even so, we suggest that you contact a company or do your own additional research, before you take any social action against a company based on our ratings.

What is a flag?

Flags are data sources that mention the company but do not add to its rating. If you place your cursor over a flag, you will see the popup: “The icons in this area link to sources that mention this company but do not offer an evaluation of its social performance.”There are several reasons these sources do not contribute to ratings. Sometimes the flag is a membership organization like CSRwire, Fortune 1000 list, BSR, etc. Sometimes the flag is an aged data source (Newsweek Green List 2009). Sometimes a flag is a source that does not allow us to use their actual rating (DJSI Global and Europe).

What are the sources and reasoning behind your geographic groupings?

Some regions of the world are well standardized. For instance, North America is almost always given as
Canada, the US, and Mexico. However, most other regions seem to have multiple definitions. For
instance, Europe can include Turkey or not. It can include Russia or not. Sometimes people put in
Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, etc. and sometimes not. We started with the list of UN Members, added a
couple who weren’t included (like Taiwan), and then tried to put them into reasonable groups. My own
team has pushed back on where the “stan” countries (Turkmenistan, etc.) sit and whether or not Turkey is
in the Middle East. I had a lot of heartache about dividing Asia into Asian, Southeast Asia, Southern Asia,
and Pacific. We wish we could claim that we grouped by some sustainability criteria. For instance, we
could have grouped all island nations together (flooding due to global warming) or all countries with rain
forests (risk of deforestation). We could have grouped developed together, separate from less developed.
None of this was as practical as to use rough associations and try to be sure that every country went
somewhere.

What have historically been the five types of data available?
  1. Crowd data (Glassdoor, BetterWorld, GreenPages, ImpactSpace, etc.). However, most crowd attention is on consumer goods companies and the bulk of consumer revenue comes from larger, public companies.
  2. Supply chain data (EcoVadis, Sedex, etc.). Purchasing companies have collected a lot of data from their suppliers. However, this is mostly self-reported data that is low quality (although customers do some direct audits of suppliers). Further, customers have been unwilling to share this information with anyone else. As a result, suppliers are forced to respond to multiple customer surveys (costly and annoying). Various efforts to allows the sharing of this data (e.g., Higgs) have not been successful, so far.
  3. Government databases. Some regulatory data is available on private companies (EPA Transport, PERI, etc.). Some industry groups have produced data sets that include information from smaller companies (EPEAT, ChemSec, etc.). This data is hard to aggregate because there is no standard way to name companies and subsidiaries are often given separate listings from their parents.
  4. NGO databases. NGOs focus on specific issues such as animal testing, government subsidies, proxy votes (PETA, GoodJobsFirst, AsYouSow, etc.). There are also publications that do best-of lists that include private companies. Most of these lists are small (<200 names) and have low data content (only one or two indicators per company).
  5. B Corporation. This has been a unique data set because of the depth of data available (registered B Corps report almost 100 data items). There is some audit and review of these reports so the quality is acceptable. However, only a few thousand companies have produced a registered report. BLabs does not effectively track companies that incorporate as a B Corporation (and these companies do not do any data reporting). BLabs did not obtain permission to share the data of the thousands of companies who did the BImpact certification (a system that was designed to support supply chain management). BImpact reportedly has now been shut down.
Which languages are supported in the sources you collect?

English.

More Info/Reports

 

Can I get more information on a company I am interested in?

You can get more information by subscribing to CSRHub. If you want even more information than is available to subscribers, you may want to consider buying a special report on a company from one of our data sources.

My Account

 

What are the benefits of a Demo?

As part of the demo process, we will give you a brief guided tour of the most recent updates to CSRHub, including seeing the CSRHub Dashboard in action. Request a demo today.

What are the benefits of subscribing?

Subscribers get to see more in-depth information on each of the loading... companies in our database. In particular, they can see twelve subcategory ratings (in addition to the four category ratings). This allows our subscribers to compare the performance of companies they are interested in and benchmark all companies in an industry or particular geography. Subscribers can see ratings information over time. They can see the underlying detailed information from hundreds of data sources. Some of our subscribers also have access to the CSRHub Dashboard, an excel based tool that dynamically pulls the CSR metrics you need from our loading... data point database into a spreadsheet template or your own customizable report. If you have questions about the value of a subscription, please contact us here.  

How do I renew my subscription?

To renew your subscription, first login to the site. Go to My Account in the top right of your screen. You will see a list of subscriptions. Find your latest subscription and select Renew to the right.

What is CSRHub's auto-renew policy?

All subscriptions (annual and monthly) are on a secure, automatic renewal plan. You may cancel at renewal.

What is CSRHub's guarantee?

CSRHub offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee. If you have questions or need assistance, please contact us at here

How do I Cancel my subscription?

You may cancel your subscription at renewal. To cancel your subscription, first login to the site. Click on the My Account link at the top right after you have logged in. On this page you will see your subscription. You should be able to find your most recent order on this list. Select the Cancel button to the right.

Profiles

 

How are the default profiles calculated?

CSRHub regularly studies the profiles of all of its registered users and subscribers. We periodically calculate the average of all of our user profiles. This average is used to establish our CSRHub user average profile. We have also identified three more groups of profiles: Environment focused users set a high importance on Environment ratings and fairly similar importance for the other three rating categories; Governance focused users put Governance as most important with a small secondary emphasis on Employee issues; and Community-Employee focused users split emphasis between the Community and Employee categories. About 65% of the profiles established to date could be associated with one of these four groups—there are many other smaller sub groups, some of which are growing fairly rapidly. You can read more about our profile research here: https://blog.csrhub.com/2012/01/moving-beyond-green-the-rainbow-within-csr.html

How does my profile affect my scores?

When you make one of the four categories of environment, employees, community and governance more important, you increase the effect of that category’s scores on the overall scores you see. The base category scores remain the same, but your personal overall score for each company increases or decreases. Setting special issues will also affect your scores. (See below.) You can read more about our schema on this page

Why can I only lock two of my profile categories?

The four primary categories comprise one hundred percent of a company’s rating, so the total of your choices cannot exceed the maximum value of 12. You can set the value for the two categories that are most important to you, lock them, and then adjust the remaining two values within the pre-set limit.

If I change my profile emphasis from 3 to 4, does it have the same effect as if I change it from 4 to 5?

No. Profile changes are non-linear. Changes in the middle of the score range (between 2 and 4) have less effect on your overall scores than changes at the ends. The curves used to make these adjustments are based on our analysis of how much company scores vary for each category and how far our users tend to push their preference settings. We give more effect to profile changes when there is more variation in the behavior of companies in a particular area or when our users tend to be less extreme in their views.

Ratings/Historical Ratings

 

What is the CSRHub schema?

CSRHub overall ratings are based on four categories: Environment, Employees, Community, and Governance categories. Each category has three subcategories. Environment –Environmental Policy and Reporting, Energy and Climate Change, Resource Management; Employees -- Diversity and Labor Rights, Compensation and Benefits, Training Health and Safety; Community – Community Development and Philanthropy, Human Rights and Supply Chain, Product; Governance –Leadership Ethics, Board, Transparency and Reporting. Review Our data schema for more information.

How are ratings calculated?

CSRHub takes information from its data sources and transforms it into a 0 to 100 scale. We then weight the data sources, aggregate their scores, and then adjust them so that they fit together smoothly. See our homepage and the CSRHub Rating Rules for more details.

What are fully rated companies on CSRHub?

Fully rated entities have an overall rating. They also have all four category ratings and at least five subcategory scores. We only offer an overall rating when an entity has enough ratings sources (and those sources provide enough ratings information) to allow us to estimate a rating within one point at a 95% confidence interval. We currently offer overall ratings on about loading... entities.

What are partially rated companies on CSRHub?

We have received data from about loading... sources on more than 100,000 companies and organizations. Eventually, we hope our system will allow us to publish ratings on all of these companies—and many hundreds of thousands of publicly-held companies, privately-held companies, not for profits, and government organizations. We have enough sources and data to provide full ratings across the four categories of data we track (Community, Employees, Environment, and Governance) for over loading... companies. For the rest of the companies in our system, we often have only one source of data on a company or information on only a few areas of a company’s sustainability performance. In loading... cases, we believe this data is sufficient for us to publish partial ratings—data on one or more of our twelve subcategories. These partial ratings generally allow us to also provide at least one category rating for these partially rated companies. See the steps we take to determine which ratings to publish on our partial ratings page.

What are not rated companies on CSRHub?

Not rated entities have data sources—so we know they are starting to generate expert opinions about their sustainability. However, we are not confident enough about where they stand within our ratings universe to offer a partial or full rating.

In some cases, we may indicate our best current guess of a subcategory or category rating. Please recognize that these are tentative scores only and that they are not included in the overall averages for the site. We have about loading...  entities in this category.

What is the rating scale?

CSRHub takes information from its data sources and transforms it into a 0 to 100 scale. The higher the rating the better, with 100 as the best rating. These ratings are currently clustered around 50.

Are ratings evenly distributed?

No. The average company rating is typically about 50. That is because in general, companies have a ways to go to become sustainable and socially responsible. You can read more about how we calculate ratings on our Ratings Methodology page.

What is the relation between the respective ratings and the percentage rankings, and how can one of them be used to generate or derive the other?

Percentile rank shows where a company’s ratings lie among a broader group of companies.

Let’s say that there are five companies with ratings 20, 25, 50, 55, and 80. The company with rating 50 has a 50th percentile rank. The one with 20 has a 0 percentile and the one with 80 has 100%. The one with 25 gives a 25% rank and the one with 55 gets a 75% rank.

It is clear from this example that percentiles are not as accurate a measure of a company’s perceived performance as would be the rating itself. Further, there is a strong central tendency within our ratings. As a result, two companies that are separated by a single ratings point at the bottom end (for instance) of the ratings curve might be only a percentage point apart in their ratings. However, two companies with a one ratings point difference might be four or five percentage points apart if they are in the middle of the curve.

How do I roll back data to see category/subcategory scores of a previous month (history of a company's rating)?

Only professional level subscribers can take advantage of this feature and see the history of a company's rating. Please see this page for a full description of how our date rollback system works.

Is the overall score an average of the four category scores?

The overall score is based on a weighted average of the category scores. The weights used come from each user’s profile settings. There is a non-linear translation of weight from the profile settings and the scale for each category weight is different. So, a “3.0”setting for Environment is not necessarily 2X as much weight as a “1.5”setting and the difference between 3.0 and 1.5 for Governance could be different from that for Environment. The scales we employ have been derived from study of the profile settings of our users. We know how many users set profiles at each level, so we know how rare (and therefore how heavily or lightly weighted) each setting should be.
You can read more about our profile research here: https://blog.csrhub.com/2012/01/moving-beyond-green-the-rainbow-within-csr.html.

If we have two companies, A &B that both support the community in different ways, how is CSRHub breaking down those ratings to make sure that we have an "apples to apples"comparison? Focusing on community for example sake, what are the input factors into the community metric and how are they weighted?

Our goal is to provide consistent ratings of sustainability performance across a large number of companies. We do not want to be trapped into rating only public companies (e.g., by relying primarily on public filings). We also do not want to interpret and impose ratings directly ourselves (e.g., using our own team of analysts). We want our sources to be transparent (and they are). We expect our ratings to reflect the general perception of a company’s performance, rather than a company’s true performance.

We face several methodological issues, when we approach our rating task:

A. Each source has its own perspective and reporting schema. We currently have more than loading... different ratings elements in our system. Within the area of “Board performance,”we may have sources who report that a company’s board is “good,”“C+,”or “2.3;”that a board is “diverse;”that “X% of the board members are women;”that a board meets “Y times per year;”that “the board is (or is not) involved in the sustainability process;”etc. To make sense of this mess, we have to map each element we ingest into one of the 12 parts of our schema. To make the system “fair,”we try to pull in roughly equal numbers of elements and data items for each of the 12 parts.
B. No source covers all companies. We already cover loading... companies in loading... countries. Our goal is to cover hundreds of thousands of companies in every country in the world. We will never have a single standard set of data against which we could scale and adjust everything else.
C. Sources tend to be biased or to have discontinuous ratings distributions. Once we have mapped a source, we can compare the ratings it gives for a company against all of the other ratings we have for that company. We can quickly determine if a source is biased positively or negatively. Some sources have only one value (e.g., “Yes, the company does have a policy”). We adjust each source’s results to fit the overall distribution for each subcategory and then adjust the overall distribution to reflect the input of the sources.
D. Some sources are more accurate than others. We see this again through a comparison with our other sources. When a source has poor accuracy, we reduce its weight in our system.

The above processes involve massive amounts of computation—we are following a “Big Data” approach. It would be impossible to explain to an outside user exactly why ten sources gave a score of 46 for one company and two of those source plus six others gave a score of 53 for another one. Not only would the conversions appear arbitrary without the support of our analysis (we currently have loading... data points in our system), but the conversions carry relatively little information. The most valuable information is the data we input from the sources (which we share) and our inventory of which sources track each company (which we also share).

We feel our industry and country averages also contain value. Due to the nature of our approach, all of our ratings are accurate to within less than 1.8 points. (In other words, if one company has a score of 51 and another has one of 49, we are 95% confident that the two scores are different.)

Why are some companies missing information on one of the four categories?

Although we have more than loading... data sources and more than loading... pieces of data, we don’t have every piece of data on every company. We report the information we have. Where we are missing details, we leave the information blank. This can sometimes distort the rating for a company.

How does CSRHub give ratings when it has only a few sources?

Our sources overlap with each other in thousands of places. This allows us to gauge the relative attitude of each source and adjust for their biases. As a result, when we have only a few sources available for a particular company, we can adjust those sources—based on all of our experience—and create ratings that are consistent and, we hope, fair. If the amount of data we have falls below a certain level, we do not publish a rating. There are approximately another loading... companies for whom we have partial information—but not enough to provide a rating. For more information on how we calculate ratings, please review the information on this page.

Does CSRHub pull and evaluate each individual company's reports as we produce a rating?

We do not ingest any data directly from companies. Instead, we use the ratings and opinions formed by our loading... sources as the input to our system. Our system’s goal is provide our users with the best possible estimate of how each company is viewed by its stakeholders. We do not need to collect every available fact about sustainability. Instead, we want to collect all of the opinions about a company’s performance and synthesize them into a broad, consistent, and comparable estimate of perceived performance.

There are many reasons we took this approach:

A. The available facts are not truly comparable between companies. For instance, one company may include supplier contributions in its carbon use. Another may include employee travel. A third could include the effect of its mix of power sources. A fourth might not include its subsidiaries. A normal user who sees these four sets of numbers cannot draw a conclusion from them about which company has better carbon efficiency. In contrast, our expert sources can draw conclusions based on this type of data. By combining the input of several expert sources (after removing any biases we detect in their methodologies) we get a clear signal about which company appears to have better carbon management policies.

B. Each stakeholder group has a different focus and interest. A governance source may approve of a CEO who carefully supervises all of her or his operations. An employee source may dislike the same CEO, because she/he is a micromanager who interferes in day to day operations. A labor source will care less about management style and more about whether or not the CEO allows unions to recruit members and participate in workforce management. Those who try to collect and report facts miss these nuances and obscure the fact that sustainability performance must be measured using a context of personal and moral values.

C. Some of our sources charge large amounts for the use of their data. They are willing to allow us to ingest it into our system, but would be out of business if we passed through all the detailed data they have labored to collect.

If a company improves its policies and puts more emphasis on sustainability, its score in our system should eventually rise. However, the speed with which this happens may depend upon how well the company communicates the changes it has made. It may also depend on how each of the various stakeholder groups views these changes.

Our tool does not tell you how a company is doing. It tells you how everyone else who shares your view of the world (as described in your profile) would think it was doing, if they had access to all loading... of our sources. Our tool is designed to help sustainability practitioners get feedback from the “opinion marketplace” on their company’s perceived performance.

Is it possible to be included in our database "by choice"? What steps, if any, would a company take in order for their ratings to show up on CSRHub?

No, since we do not attempt to collect data directly from the companies we cover (see above). If a company used the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework for its CSR report, committed to the UN Global Compact, joined the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, became a member of the American Sustainable Business Council, etc., they might already be rated (at least partially) by CSRHub. As a company expands the scope of their sustainability work, they will be noticed by our sources and we will start to learn about your activities. This organic approach is the easiest way to join the sustainability metrics world.

You can use our system to discover competitors who rank well and then do your own analysis of how they have attracted attention and praise for their work. As an alternative, CSRHub could introduce you to one of the sustainability consulting firms with whom we have partnered. Our partners could review your internal systems and programs, benchmark your performance against that of your competitors, and then advise you of the best ways to disclose and promote your sustainability achievements.

What are special issues?

Some issues don’t fall into our four category structure. For instance, whether or not a company tests its products on animals, does business in Burma, or is a good place for women to work may not be directly covered by ratings on a company’s governance, labor relations, etc. Special issues are things you feel especially strongly about. You can choose to make their presence in a company a positive thing (e.g., you could upgrade companies that support unions), a negative thing (e.g., you could downgrade the ratings of companies that are against the NRA), or drop the ratings entirely for those companies who are involved in an area you feel strongly about. If you choose “exclude” for a special issue, a company that has this issue will show no rating. It will also be taken out of the ratings for its geography and industry. This reflects the fact that some of our users feel so strongly about special issues that they are uncomfortable with seeing any rating for these companies. See a complete list of the special issues we track.

What is the relation between the respective ratings and the percentage rankings, and how can one of them be used to generate or derive the other?

Percentile rank shows where a company’s ratings lie among a broader group of companies. Let’s say that
there are five companies with ratings 20, 25, 50, 55, and 80. The company with rating 50 has a 50th
percentile rank. The one with 20 has a 0 percentile and the one with 80 has 100%. The one with 25 gives
a 25% rank and the one with 55 gets a 75% rank.

What is the relation between the marks or points of the respective constituents (in terms of their economic, Employee, Social, and Governance) of a fully rated company and its overall rating and percentage ranking, and how can points of the respective constituents be used or averaged to derive the overall rating and percentage ranking.

It is clear from this example that percentiles are not as accurate a measure of a company’s perceived
performance as would be the rating itself. Further, there is a strong central tendency within our ratings. As
a result, two companies that are separated by a single ratings point at the bottom end (for instance) of the
ratings curve might be only a percentage point apart in their ratings. However, two companies with a one
ratings point difference might be four or five percentage points apart if they are in the middle of the curve.

Do you provide any dates in the feed that users can leverage for historical back testing? Should users apply any lags to dates when testing the data historically?

Our data set goes back (monthly) to December 2008. Because we integrate data from other sources, our ratings lag and are backward-looking. However, our data set should offer a coincident signal—e.g., our data for January 1, 2020 should represent what the historic view was of the companies we covered, at that time.

Was a portion of the data backfilled? If so, please describe when and what data has been backfilled.

None.

Please describe the point-in-time nature of the feed.

The data for May 2020 should be available in July 2020.

Are historical values ever changed or deleted?

No.

Please describe how the coverage universe of securities is determined.

We cover any entity (public-traded, privately-held, or non-for-profit/government) for which sustainability-related information is available.

Do you weigh your sources when creating your rank?

We normalize at the indicator level. We map at that level on a many-to-many basis. We weight at that
level. We also weight at the source level. Overall, this gives us a lot of flexibility to accommodate the
variety of types of data we receive and the “shape” of their ratings curves. We do not “pick” sources. Our
system picks them for us via the weighting approach. Since each company has a different array of
available sources, the distribution of weight and importance of each source varies by company. We do
not direct companies and tell them to work on particular sources. But, we can tell them in general where
they are strong and weak and we can show them which sources within each area have more or less
influence on their scores. Through this, companies can create an action plan that we hope is primarily
based on changes in their policies and practices. They can then create a communication plan and share
their improved behavior with those sources who may be interested. Companies often use us to find new
sources—groups they feel they want to engage with. This is a non-linear walk with many branches and
options.

When you state that rankings are “uniformly distributed,” do you mean normally distributed (mean at 50th percentile and 1 standard deviation at the 16th and 84th percentiles, for example)?

Our ratings can’t be normally distributed because they are bounded (do not go to infinity). We use instead a beta distribution model. Each subcategory has its own median value and the peak of each curve may be at that median, to the right of the median, or to the left of the median. Our system tends to keep each median near 50, but some are always above and some are always below. The shape of each subcategory rating curve is different.

Does “consensus view” mean the consensus among CSRHub raters on each separate subcategory dimension? How do you assess consensus? Does everyone have to agree with the rating (full consensus) or do you average the raters’ individual scores for each separate subcategory?

Each subcategory’s evaluation is done separately. Each one is fit to its own beta distribution. We adjust
for consensus at the source level. For instance, if a source is a biased right (has all positive readings), we
will compare it against all other ratings in that subcategory. It could be that the source is only looking at
companies that are positively rated by everyone else. If so, we’d leave its ratings biased right. If a source
strongly correlates with all other sources, we up weight the strength of that source.

Search for Information

 

How do I search a company?

Simply start entering a company name or ticker in the top right text box where it says "Look for a company" in the top banner throughout our site. Choose a name from the list, if more than one company shows. Or, enter the entire company name and click the Search button. You may also choose Advanced Search from the top menu to go to the Advanced Search area. See more on our Suggested Ways to use Advanced Search page.

How do I use the logic function in advanced search (or, how do I search for more than one thing at a time)?

The logic function enables users to specify their preferences. To search for companies with an exact score only (e.g. 65), use “=”. If you’d like to find companies with a specific or higher rating, use “>=”(e.g. 65 and up) and for a specific rating or lower “<=”(e.g. 65 and lower). “<”and “>”will exclude the value you enter and only give you lower and higher values (e.g. 64 and lower or 66 and higher). You can use loading... sources to conduct unlimited advanced logic searches for industry, data source, geography, name, score and special issue or category rating. e.g. Find the top 5 USA companies in the Alternate Energy industry, who reported to GRI and have Environmental scores >50 based on a specific profile. See more on our Suggested Ways to use Advanced Search page.

User Interface

 

How do I export my search results?

Professional subscribers can export their search results. You need to log in to CSRHub, go to the search page (www.csrhub.com/csrhub), use the advanced search logic options to find the data you are interested in,  then click on the Orange button, Export Search result. You can choose to export to a new window, a .csv file, or an email.

How do I convert the exported data to a sortable format in Excel?

A. Highlight the left column on your spreadsheet (the one that holds the data).
B. Go to the “Data” menu in Excel and pick “Text to columns” conversion.
C. In the menu for conversion, tell the wizard to use “semicolons” as a “delimiter.”

The reason we use semicolons as a delimiter is because many company names contain commas and other special characters. Fortunately, to date, none contain semicolons! This should result in a nicely formatted table with headings and each item in a sortable format.