Bloomberg's Progress Towards 2020 Sustainability Goals

Originally posted on http://www.bloomberg.com/bcause.

Measure the impact—accelerate the results
Our founder’s ethos of “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” is at the core of everything we do. In 2013, we announced 2020 Targets; we summarize our progress over the past four years.

Highlights from 2016
We have significant participation across our employee engagement and social impact programs “BCause,” which includes Philanthropy & Engagement, Diversity & Inclusion, Sustainable Business & Finance, and Wellness initiatives. Ninety percent of our employees engaged with at least one BCause group and 49% with two or more. In 2016, more than 11,000 employees dedicated over 128,000 hours of volunteer service in 74 cities around the world.

We continue to embed sustainable finance deeper into our products and services, industry vertical groups and media outlets. In 2016, Bloomberg introduced new transparency into green bonds issuers’ disclosures and Bloomberg Intelligence launched ESG industry and topic primers to provide analyses of key sustainability trends.

Bloomberg Impact Accelerator
The Impact Accelerator provides an avenue for our employees to use their skills to work with nonprofits and other partners to address social and environmental challenges.

In 2016, 144 employees dedicated more than 1,400 hours to complete five Accelerator projects involving nine nonprofit partners. Since its launch in 2014, 437 employees from 20 Bloomberg offices globally have participated in an Impact Accelerator project—completing 30 projects with 21 nonprofit partners and giving nearly 4,500 hours of service.

The Impact Accelerator taps into our employees’ skill sets to work on social and environmental issues that Bloomberg, as a media,technology and financial data company, is uniquely positioned to address. For example, in 2016, Bloomberg, in collaboration with several nonprofit partners, launched the Bloomberg Financial Services Gender-Equality Index (BFGEI) in May 2016, providing investors with valuable reference data on gender equality in the financial services industry, measuring internal company statistics, employee policies, gender-conscious product offerings and external community engagement. Another example is our work with Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses program; our employees shared their expertise to refine strategies and address challenges for small growing businesses.

Challenges on the way to 2020
We are making significant progress toward our goals, but not without some challenges along the way. Some goals we set back in 2013 aren’t practical in the current environment, and others are just more challenging to track and report on.

Engagement: When we set out to establish a BCause Ambassador program, our Diversity & Inclusion Communities didn’t have the membership and global reach that they have today. Leaders and participants in the eight Communities gain exposure to and help ingrain BCause values and programs into our culture. The other BCause pillars also have champions that emerged organically over time. With that, we question whether it makes sense to change or overly formalize a structure that seems to be working.

Operations: We have not directly pursued renewable energy projects with our partners to reach the 10MW target that we had set. Rather, we have focused on influencing the renewable market through actively working with various industry groups—the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA), Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), Business Renewables Center (BRC) and Corporate Renewable Energy Buyers’ Principles—to share best practices around the corporate renewable landscape. 

To read Bloomberg's 2016 Impact Report, click here.