5.1 Have an Ethical and Sustainability Product Strategy
Success Criterion
The organization has published a publicly available Code of Ethics, Product Guidelines, Sustainability, or ESG Statement that includes language specific to digital products, services, policies, and programs.
List achievements, features, compliance, and anything beyond the scope of these guidelines and publish it in a sustainability section of your product or service.
The organization can show how it effectively governs implemented digital sustainability, climate policies, and related ESG practices over time.
The organization has training decks and workshops it uses to onboard new team members on how it implements more sustainable product strategies.
Raise awareness with your visitors by documenting your methodology, through impact storytelling, documentation, and helping individuals make more informed decisions.
The organization can show how it powers digital products and services with renewable energy.
Impact & Effort High High
GRI High High High High
5.2 Assign a Sustainability Representative
Success Criterion
Choose and assign an ecological referee (with specific digital expertise) for the product or service within your organization.
Impact & Effort Medium Low
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.3 Raise Awareness and Inform
Success Criterion
Make sure that all project stakeholders, including product teams, colleagues, and organizational decision-makers (managers and clients) are informed about and trained in your business's use of sustainable technology.
Encourages stakeholders to actively reduce their environmental impact by providing resources on sustainable design, practices, and concepts.
Impact & Effort Medium Medium
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.4 Communicate the Ecological Impact of User Choices
Success Criterion
Clearly communicate the ecological implications of visitor choices and allow visitors to configure settings based on those choices.
Impact & Effort Medium Medium
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.5 Estimate a Product or Service's Environmental Impact
Success Criterion
Conduct a full life-cycle Analysis based on the functional unit defined in Guideline 5.15.
Estimate the environmental impact of your or your competitor's current service to inform decision-making (as a potential target goal).
When identifying the environmental impact of your product or service, be sure to include the impact (or estimates of) of any tooling used to create the product or service along with any third-party solutions utilized in the pipeline. While not created by you, the emissions they generate from production to maintenance are considered integral to your overall solution.
Impact & Effort Medium Medium
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.6 Define Clear Organizational Sustainability Goals and Metrics
Success Criterion
The organization has defined and published a clear set of sustainability goals. It publicly communicates how it will meet these goals, including which performance metrics are important to help the organization and its various stakeholders thrive.
Impact & Effort Low Medium
GRI Low Low Low Low
5.7 Verify Your Efforts Using Established Third-Party Business Certifications
Success Criterion
The organization has achieved one or more business sustainability certifications and incorporated operational policies and practices to support them.
The organization maintains its certification through evolving policies and practices over time.
Impact & Effort Medium Medium
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.8 Implement Sustainability Onboarding Guidelines
Success Criterion
The organization has dedicated training manuals, workshops, and materials that outline the ESG policies and practices it follows and how to implement them. While managing and maintaining these materials over time, adapting them as new policies and practices arise.
The organization incentivizes leadership, teams, and stakeholders to make progress toward the goals outlined in their training, including time for sustainability activities, recognition for completion, and so on.
The organization anticipates and maps potential negative external variables on the service, and acts to minimize their overall impact.
Impact & Effort High High
GRI High High High High
5.9 Support Mandatory Disclosures and Reporting
Success Criterion
The organization has created and published policies and practices for disclosing the social and environmental impacts of its products, services, policies, and programs in line with existing reporting standards such as GRI Performance, SASB , etc.
The organization produces a publicly available impact report outlining its progress against previous reports on social and environmental goals at least once per year.
The organization publicly and transparently follows existing or emerging environmental standards and legislative policy that promotes mandatory disclosures and reporting for emissions. This is done alongside other social and environmental criteria in its impact reporting, maintaining these practices over time for future reports.
The organization clearly identifies how it reduces its environmental impact, avoiding double accounting, greenwashing, excluded data, or other manipulative techniques.
Impact & Effort Medium Medium
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.10 Create One or More Impact Business Models
Success Criterion
The organization has completed (and operationalized) a Theory of Change process with requisite documentation to identify the impact it hopes to create, how it will generate revenue, shared, or added value from these activities, how it will measure results based on desired outcomes; or in the case of launched projects, is generating revenue, actively tracking and measuring progress against any desired outcomes.
Impact & Effort High Medium
GRI High High High High
5.11 Follow a Product Management and Maintenance Strategy
Success Criterion
The organization has documented policies outlining how it approaches product management and maintenance.
The organization has maintenance / security plans in place for all the digital products and services it manages.
The organization appropriately resources products over time via staffing and budgeting to support refactoring code, addressing technical debt, new product features, ongoing testing, and product or service maintenance plans to continue supporting its customers, visitors, and other stakeholders.
The organization incorporates carbon and resource measurement into maintenance programs and can show measurable improvement over time.
Impact & Effort High Low
GRI High High High High
5.12 Implement Continuous Improvement Procedures
Success Criterion
The organization has created policies and practices to enable continuous improvement and has resourced the organization appropriately to support these efforts over time.
Agile sprints and update frequency must go through a review process to ensure project teams have enough time to conduct user-research, identify technical debt, and produce quality output.
Use (and show a track record of) continuous improvement (iteration) to analyze your website or application while also addressing the by-products and potential consequences of ongoing experimentation, such as technical debt, product performance, emissions, and related issues. Limiting analytics to only necessary features to aid with decision-making, encouraging visitor feedback, and comparing performance against business goals and visitor needs.
Justify and prioritize the retention of existing features, the creation of new functionality, and the decommission or elimination of unused functionality and unvisited pages through the product's life cycle.
Provide corrective security and policy updates during the product or service lifecycle, while distinguishing these updates from more extensive evolutionary updates.
Develop sustainable product and data strategies along with appropriate training techniques that help your team (managers, colleagues, etc) build capacity and learn new skills to manage and maintain products and services over time.
Impact & Effort High High
GRI High High High High
5.13 Document Future Updates and Evolutions
Success Criterion
The user-experience considers possible changes to the product or service such as adding, updating, or removing features.
Impact & Effort Low Low
GRI Low Low Low Low
5.14 Establish if a Digital Product or Service Is Necessary
Success Criterion
Review and identify whether your product or service aligns with one of the U.N. (SDGs).
Evaluate the desirability, feasibility, and viability of the digital product or service they wish to create to ascertain whether it is necessary.
Determine that no existing digital product or service offers the same value. They have conducted an analysis to understand whether a new product or service is necessary.
Consider any obstacles to using a product or service, such as accessibility, equality, technical, or territorial.
Impact & Effort High Low
GRI High High High High
5.15 Determine the Functional Unit
Success Criterion
Consider and conduct a life-cycle Assessment (LCA ) to define the requirements of your product's function throughout its lifecycle.
Impact & Effort Medium Medium
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.16 Create a Supplier Standards of Practice
Success Criterion
The organization has created specific policies to vet potential partners in its supply chain based on ESG principles.
The organization has partnered with suppliers to create, track, and measure collective impact on issues that impact their stakeholders.
The organization promotes its partnerships in a publicly available place, along with information on how the partnership creates a collective impact.
Impact & Effort High High
GRI High High High High
5.17 Share Economic Benefits
Success Criterion
The organization publicly commits to paying employees, contractors, and other stakeholders a living wage.
The organization has policies and practices in place to incentivize stakeholders, such as workers and contractors, to meet its impact goals.
The organization provides benefits to employees in accordance with its resources, including, where relevant, healthcare, retirement planning, flex time, profit sharing, and so on.
The organization advocates for responsible legislation that supports employment rights, transparency, and accountability related to sharing economic benefits.
Impact & Effort High High
GRI High High High High
5.18 Share Decision-Making Power With Appropriate Stakeholders
Success Criterion
Ensure that the project team's goals are aligned with key business objectives, and project stakeholders (for example, project managers) have the power and autonomy to make key decisions on the organization's behalf.
Impact & Effort Low High
GRI Low Low Low Low
5.19 Use Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (JEDI ) Practices
Success Criterion
The organization has documented its commitment to JEDI practices with clear policies on how it prioritizes marginalized or otherwise underserved communities, including Black, Indigenous, People of Color, LGBTQIA+, Women, Disabled, Veterans, Seniors, and so on.
The organization has an accessibility policy for digital products and services and can show this via a verified accessible website, application, product, or service.
The organization has JEDI -related training materials and schedules ongoing workshops related to how this topic manifests itself in digital products and services (algorithmic bias, digital divide, gig economy work, mis / disinformation, etc).
The organization can show measurable JEDI improvement over time in its hiring, leadership, and operations.
The organization advocates for responsible legislation relating to JEDI practices, especially as related to digital products and services.
Impact & Effort High High
GRI High High High High
5.20 Promote Responsible Data Practices
Success Criterion
The organization has a public-facing privacy policy in place and supports existing privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR ), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA ), and so on. This policy must be accessible for all visitors, including those with accessibility and reading comprehension needs, and abide by plain English best practices to avoid jargon, technical language, and legalese.
The organization can show measurable progress over time on how it respects data privacy and ownership, including a visitor's "right-to-be-forgotten" and provides the ability to export data.
The organization supports new and emerging legislation related to data privacy, data sustainability, and responsible data practices.
Impact & Effort High Medium
GRI High High High High
5.21 Implement Appropriate Data Management Procedures
Success Criterion
Outdated or otherwise expired product content and data are archived and deleted via automated expiration dates and scheduled product audits. Create an archiving schedule with a lighter version of the old searchable content available.
Enable users to control, manage, and delete their data, subscriptions, and accounts.
Impact & Effort Low High
GRI Low Low Low Low
5.22 Promote and Implement Responsible Emerging Technology Practices
Success Criterion
The organization has public-facing policies in place for emerging technologies, and all such technologies are ethically sourced, screened, validated, and implemented in a non-discriminatory, responsible manner.
The organization can show how it up-skills workers as new technologies and practices potentially disrupt its business model.
The organization supports responsible legislation related to automation and emerging technologies.
Organizations must consider, audit, and account for any environmental considerations that may derive from the use of emerging technologies they wish to either promote or implement within a chosen setting. Also note that this should include third-party choices, the "expense" (in terms of waste or emissions) of the utilization of the technology to create a desired result, and consequential issues to the environment that may arise from its deployment.
Don't roll out post-quantum encryption for high-traffic services that don't need resilience against harvest now, decrypt later.
Impact & Effort High Medium
GRI High High High High
5.23 Include Responsible Financial Policies
Success Criterion
The organization has divested from fossil fuels and moved its banking, sponsorship, and other affiliations to more responsible partners.
The organization engages in flexible financing and responsible budgeting for its digital products and services to accommodate long-term care and maintenance.
Impact & Effort High High
GRI High High High High
5.24 Include Organizational Philanthropy Policies
Success Criterion
The organization has a clear corporate giving policy and creates philanthropic partnerships with strategically aligned organizations.
The organization engages in free or volunteer projects, which help its team learn new tools and tactics, while also helping charities and non-profit organizations build capacity.
Impact & Effort High Medium
GRI High High High High
5.25 Plan for a Digital Product or Service's Care and End-of-Life
Success Criterion
Establish clear, documented end-of-life guidelines that include data disposal, archiving, file deletion, and so on.
Impact & Effort Medium Medium
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.26 Include E-Waste, Right-To-Repair, and Recycling Policies
Success Criterion
The organization has specific policies in place to recycle e-waste and repair owned technology products whenever possible.
The organization has formed relationships with local partners for e-waste recycling and repair.
The organization buys refurbished equipment whenever possible.
The organization should allow consumers to repair (to the best of their ability) the consumables they purchase, offering (if possible at cost) replacement components and clear instructions to resolve faults that occur.
Impact & Effort High Medium
GRI High High High High
5.27 Define Performance and Environmental Budgets
Success Criterion
The product team has defined, baselined, and documented clear sustainability and environmental budget criteria that cover the page, user-journey, and digital service levels and metrics (such as a CO2.js score) that are approved by relevant product stakeholders.
Use tools such as a performance budget to determine the maximum size (goals) your app or website can weigh to reduce the data transfer and HTTP request impact (using metrics like Google Lighthouse).
Define KPIs around engineering hours, development time, or sprints keeping the health and wellbeing of your workers paramount. Consideration should be taken around optimizing your workflow sustainably to allow all tasks to be performed with care.
The product team can measurably show how much the budgeting process improved performance and reduced emissions.
The product team invests in resources to build capacity and maintain the budgets over time.
Impact & Effort Medium Medium
GRI Medium Medium Medium Medium
5.28 Use Open Source Tools
Success Criterion
The organization has a clear open source policy in place that outlines how it uses open source tools and the practices it supports surrounding open source development.
The organization has a track record of collaboration and community-building around open source principles.
The organization regularly contributes to open source community-based projects.
Impact & Effort High High
GRI High High High High
5.29 Create a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan
Success Criterion
The organization has created a plan of action that is regularly reviewed and occasionally tested to determine readiness in case of an incident and has procedures to quickly recover from such issues.
The organization regularly maintains transparent communication with its audience regarding issues that may affect service delivery or user data.
Impact & Effort Low Medium
GRI Low Low Low Low