The Importance of Earnestly Being a B Corp

B CorpPurpose and Values

28 Nov

Written By Tanck

By Angus Crowther

Tanck recently completed a 9-month journey to become certified as a B Corp. It’s something we are immensely proud of.

Why did we want to invest in becoming a B Corp?

For us, being a B Corp ensures that no matter how busy we get with the day-to-day business of helping our clients achieve great things, we will always keep one eye on staying true to our values. It will serve as a benchmark year on year to make sure we are on track as a business with achieving our social and environmental goals.

Speaking candidly, the process of becoming a B Corp wasn’t easy. We actually don’t believe it should be easy!

While at times we felt some frustrations with the rigour of the B Corp process, ultimately, we found it very rewarding:

It helped us identify ways that we could formalise the values we espouse into processes, present those to the team for feedback and then bring those processes into effect.
It made us stop, reflect, gather information, consider that information and then set meaningful future objectives.
It has given us the space and tools to really think about how we want to measure our successes as an impact focused company.

We believe becoming a B Corp has added a lot of value to Tanck. As a B Corp, our Impact Business Model is “Support for Purpose Driven Enterprises”.

But what does that really mean?

It means we are providing a service that directly supports the operations of purpose driven organisations. In our case, that service is building their skills and capacity to advocate directly to government and other stakeholders, to gain funding and policy change to help amplify their impact.

Our Advocacy for Impact system was especially created for social sector organisations. It is based on proven advocacy and engagement methods and is designed to help impact focussed organisations be really effective in communicating their work and needs to government. We share our political knowledge, experience, tips and tools with clients to help them better achieve their engagement goals.

We’re proud to say that 100% of our clients have a demonstrable commitment to social and/or environmental benefit.

Social sector organisations sometimes have access to a lower level of resources than private sector organisations. So, whether it’s securing more funding for services or program delivery or helping with the establishment of a parliamentary friendship group/enquiry into an important issue, our aim is to unlock more of what our clients need to achieve their mission and to assist in securing resources that might be otherwise unattainable without our support.

We see our work with clients as a partnership. We tailor our services to their objectives and check in with them regularly to ensure our services are meeting their needs. We exist to empower organisations to have confidence in engaging government and other stakeholders on their own terms. We want to build our clients up, then step back and let them shine!

Working in the social sector is challenging - it can be difficult and contested, and progress is often hard won. Our client organisations are incredible. Their drive and passion to make the world a better place for their communities inspires us. Their work is why we want to reshape government engagement in Australia and provide new pathways for fantastic organisations to be heard.

Having achieved certification as a B Corp, we are now part of a global business community that want to see a better economic system. We are one of over 7,000 businesses worldwide who strive to incorporate the benefit of people, communities and the planet into our everyday business activities.

We are now required to constantly measure our impact as a business across five pillars – workers, customers, governance, environment and community. We’re going to expand on those 5 areas a little in future blogs, but for now our commitment to being a B Corp can be summed up by the fact that as a business, we have deliberately chosen to prioritise positive impact over profit maximisation.

This certification is representative of the values upon which Tanck was founded: That by working together we can cumulatively make a real difference to our communities, nation, and world.