It’s the time of year again for us to report on our B Corp impact for the last 12 months. It’s been a year since our last B Corp blog, and in an impeccable stroke of timing, March is also B Corp Month – a time to build awareness of the movement and celebrate what it means to be a B Corp.
Uprise Up has proudly been a B Corp for two years now. It was by no means an easy road to certification, but as a purpose-driven business, we felt it was a journey we should fully embrace. If you’re curious about what that journey looked like, you can read all about it here.
Who or what is B Corp?
In a nutshell, B Corp is a movement to use business for good. Certified businesses are demonstrating they meet high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability. It’s a global movement and in the UK alone there are over 2,000 B Corps.
Why did we become a B Corp?
We’ve always been closely aligned with the values of B Corp. Our ethos of continuous improvement means we are always looking for ways to make our business even better for its staff, customers, community, and the environment. B Corp is a driving force and a clear demonstration of our commitment.
One B Corp requirement is that businesses report on their impact each year. They must recertify every 3 years, and in the interim businesses use the B Impact Assessment tool to estimate their score.
In this blog we’re proud to share how we’ve fared over the last year. You can see last year’s blog here.
80 is the magic number
A business has to score 80 points or more in B Corp’s Impact Assessment to be certified. Our verified score at certification in March 2023 was 105.9. We reported that, in March 2024, our score was 109.4. Having crunched the numbers, we’re delighted to report that as of March 2025 our score is 112.8.
How the scoring works
There are big changes planned for B Corp certification. At time of writing, the details of the revised process have not been announced, but B Corp have advised that the scoring (as shown below) will fundamentally change. Existing B Corps will have an extension to the recertification window to allow them to understand and adapt to the changes, so we wait to see what this will mean for us.
There are currently five separate impact areas:
Workers – from 35.1 to 36.3
The Workers Impact Area evaluates our company’s contribution to our employees’ financial, physical, professional, and social wellbeing. Having made a significant impact in the previous report, we’re delighted to further improve our score over the last 12 months.
What we wanted to do: Ensure Uprise Up continues to have great staff benefits and further increase staff engagement.
What we did:
- We are hybrid workers with the option to work from home on Mondays and Fridays. We have flexibility each day to work the hours that best suit us, and we are trialling extra flexibility to enable staff to easily enjoy long weekends by shifting their work patterns by taking a Friday afternoon and Monday morning off without using up annual leave.
- Made sure everyone is aware of what we offer in health benefits, including access to BUPA healthcare for staff and their partners and/or children, the option of a free professional health check every year (our last company wide health checks were in June 2024 and had a high take-up), and free access to the Headspace app. We also offer free flu vaccination vouchers.
- We have evolved our 6-monthly appraisals to become Career Development Meetings, which focus more clearly on joint development objectives to grow our employees and get them exactly where they want to be.
- As we have focused on training and development, we have strengthened our programme of weekly company-wide training sessions to complement team and individual training, and have a dedicated (and fantastic) trainer on the team.
- Continued to ensure all our staff are fairly remunerated.
What we would like to do next year: Continually consider how best to maintain a healthy work-life balance for our staff, and make sure everyone remains well rewarded.
Customers – from 28.7 to 32.3
This area evaluates our company’s value to our customers and our customer’s own beneficiaries. We provide marketing services predominantly helping charities and socially positive organisations, many of whom work with underserved populations*. We contribute to providing better outcomes for their beneficiaries (e.g. through campaigns to increase fundraising, volunteers, information, support, and campaigning).
This area saw the biggest increase, largely due to more of our work being focused on helping charities make a difference.
What we wanted to do: Further develop the Charity Digital Benchmark so it becomes an invaluable toolkit for as many charities as possible, creating improvements for the whole charity sector, including our own clients. The Charity Digital Benchmark helps charities make better decisions on their digital activity, driving better results for their causes.
What we did:
- We have continued to invest heavily in and significantly develop the Charity Digital Benchmark. It’s a benchmarking tool to identify trends, highlight opportunities and learn from other charities. The Charity Digital Benchmark at time of writing has 40+ members.
- We are incredibly proud of the impact our work has for our clients, and we’ve become even more focused on working with charities.
What we would like to do next year: Grow membership of the Charity Digital Benchmark and share more digital metrics. More data from more members will better inform users and allow them to improve the effectiveness of their digital campaigns, resulting in improved end results for charities and their beneficiaries.
Community – from 16.5 to 15.1
This area evaluates our company’s positive impact on the external communities in which we operate. With a challenging market is the one area where we’ve seen a small decrease in our score. It is still a great score, on a par with our initial score at verification.
What we wanted to do: Increase our volunteering, improve our diversity, and continue to give back to the local community.
What we did:
- Welcomed three Year 10 students from local schools to join us for work experience programmes as an introduction to digital marketing and the world of work.
- Gave to local charities. Also, for the first time, our Secret Santa exchange was solely gifts purchased from charity shops (resulting in some memorable presents).
- Continued to undertake pro bono work.
- Improved our gender split.
- Continued to monitor our diversity with anonymous surveys including gender, ethnicity, religion/belief, disability, and social economic background.
- Continued our annual diversity, equity and inclusion training.
What we would like to do next year: Increase our volunteering to give more back to the local community. We’ll continue our efforts to maintain and improve our own diversity.
Environment – 10.8
The Environment Impact Area evaluates our company’s overall environmental stewardship, including how we identify and manage general environmental impacts, our management of air and climate issues, water sustainability, and impacts on land and life. We maintained our strong score.
What we wanted to do: Further reduce our energy usage where possible; find more sustainable consumables; continue composting; and roll that out to more companies using the same office premises.
What we did:
- Continued to create compost from our food waste, and that of other companies in the same shared buildings, for local charity Chesham in Bloom.
- Started collecting and recycling plastics not recycled at home, such as plastic bags.
- Switched to more energy-efficient power cables to feed our office workstations.
- Held company discussions to brainstorm how we can reduce our energy usage and waste. This included an interesting session around the wider environmental impact of digital marketing.
- Continued our environmental awareness training.
- Continued to monitor and offset our carbon emissions.
What we would like to do next year: Continue keeping energy usage and sustainability front of mind across the company and minimise wastage.
Governance – 18.1
This area looks at our mission, ethics, accountability and transparency – an area we already scored highly in. We hadn’t identified any areas for improvement here and our priorities for next year lie largely in the other areas.
Summary
We are always trying to improve and we are proud to see that reflected in our overall report.
After a number of new worker initiatives and benefits were taken into account in the previous report, we are pleased that we have further increased our score in this area. We continue our strong performance in the Environment and Governance areas, and hope to be able to further increase our score in the Community area over this year and beyond.
Our specialty of working with the charity sector has seen our most significant score increase in the Customer area. And we continue to drive digital results through our investment in the Charity Digital Benchmark.
As mentioned, B Corp are changing their certification process. There will likely be new impact topics and different standards by size and sector, so recertification (extended to the end of 2026) will look different for us, as no doubt will these future Impact Reports.
Work With Us
If you’re a charity looking for a responsible, data-driven digital media agency, we’d love to hear from you! You can either contact us with an enquiry or take a look at the digital media services we offer.
If you like the sound of our company, and want to work as part of our award-winning team getting up in the morning to make a real difference, you can also take a look at available roles on our careers page.
* ‘Underserved’ is a term used by B Corp to describe groups that do not traditionally have access to positive social or economic outcomes. This can be low-income, poor, or very poor individuals or a group lacking access due to chronic discrimination which may include discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity, colour, disability, political opinion, sexual orientation, age, religion, or social origin.
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