Our impact
All business activities have an impact on society and the environment, and Kind is no exception.
This statement outlines the impacts our day-to-day activities have, how we are reducing or offsetting these and how we aim to further reduce them in the future.
B Corporation
In March 2022, Kind certified as a B Corporation - joining over 5,000 organisations who are transforming the global economy to benefit all people, communities and the planet. Organisations like The Guardian, innocent, Patagonia, and Abel & Cole.
B Corporation certification legally requires us to:
- create a material positive impact on society and the environment through our business operation
- consider all stakeholders (not just shareholders) when making business decisions. These stakeholders include our team, our suppliers, the environment and society as a whole.
To certify, B Corporations are required to go through a “B Impact Assessment” and gain a score of over 80 points, verified by B Lab analysts. Kind scored 93.6.
Additionally, B Lab found that Kind has an Impact Business Model due to our support for purpose-driven enterprises. A company with an Impact Business Model is intentionally designed to create a specific positive outcome for one its stakeholders.
What else can we do?
B Impact Assessments happen every 3 years, and we’re in the process of making improvements to our business that will hopefully increase our score and, more importantly, increase our positive impact.
Charity partnerships
Kind have been members of 1% for the Planet since 2017 which requires us to donate a minimum of 1% of our turnover to environmental causes.
In 2019 we selected Rewilding Britain as our environmental charity partner and pledged the majority of our 1% donations to their cause.
We've also been members of the Surfers Against Sewage Ocean Network since 2018, supporting their work to end sewage and plastic pollution in our oceans.
Over the last three financial years, we have donated 28% of our profits and 136 hours of our times to charitable causes. That equates to a donated value of more than £15,000.
Since 2014, our donated value is more than £23,000.
The impact of our activity
Since we founded Kind in 2014, we’ve been very selective about who we work with. Our clientbase is 100% made up of organisations that have a net positive impact on society and/or the environment. This includes education providers, environmental charities, arts organisations and healthcare researchers.
When talking to potential new clients, we have a scoring system that uses third-party tools to measure both the positive and negative impacts created by the organisation’s work. We then have a benchmark score that a client must reach before we agree to work with them. Because we have become known for our work in certain sectors, the majority of our potential clients reach this benchmark with ease, but the process led to us turning away a lot of potentially lucrative projects in our formative years. After all, we value impact above profit.
We are a Living Wage Employer. Although all of our team are paid at least twice the living wage, we decided to register as a Living Wage Employer to ensure that our interns are paid fairly too, even though they don’t contribute to project work.
Our median gender pay gap is 0%, because there's no reason why it shouldn't be. Our full-time equivalent team is 50% female, 50% male, just like our business ownership.
Additional to pay, we give our team:
- Hybrid working and flexible hours
- Unlimited holiday allowance that we encourage our team to make use of
- A team summer trip which includes positive impact activities
What else can we do?
- Find an ethical medical insurance supplier
- Address the current lack of diversity within the team
Our team work both from their homes and from our shared workspace at Works Social. (2021’s East Midlands “Start-up of the Year”). This hybrid approach allows our team to reduce their commuting time and gives them the flexibility to do the school run or carry out personal wellbeing activities, like going for a run or baking bread, during their working day.
Having a shared office space, also gives them the opportunity to get away from the house to interact with their team and other creatives in person, or even if they just want to reduce their energy bill slightly.
Works Social is a sustainable co-working space in Nottingham’s Lace Market. Sustainability measures they have introduced include:
- Run entirely on renewable energy supplied by Bulb
- Sensor activated LED lighting
- Boiling water taps, so we only heat what we use
- Large windows on all walls on the third floor (where Kind are based), means the sun provides the majority of our heating
- Using hypoallergenic, environmentally responsible and ethically sound cleaning products
- Using recycled and zero waste office supplies wherever possible
- A wormery to compost all of our food waste
What else can we do?
- Plants have a positive environmental impact, but also improve the wellbeing of our team. We should introduce more into the working environment
- Explore cycle to work initiatives
- Encourage or incentivise public transport use for commuting
Everyone needs to eat, but some meals have a bigger negative impact than others. So, when we eat out or drink as a team, we always do 3 things:
- We visit local and independent businesses that have a net positive social impact in Nottingham (or wherever our team are at the time). We’re big fans of Junkyard, Jamcafe and Alchemilla, who all play a hugely positive role in the local community, but also cater for our vegetarian and pescatarian team members.
- The company always pays because it shouldn’t cost anyone to feel part of the team.
- We keep track of what people consume, so we can offset the potential negative environmental impact of that consumption.
What else can we do?
- Encourage our team to try more vegan and vegetarian alternatives to their meals.
- Encourage our team to eat and drink more local produce.
Our waste management policy outlines how we adopt a ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ approach to waste. It also sets our yearly maximum landfill target (as unfortunately some waste is not recyclable or compostable) at 50kg.
Our office space at Works Social in Nottingham is home to a wormery that is used to compost food waste within the building. So every cup of tea we make can be used to grow plants.
Kind have clients all over the UK but even making a visit by public transport has an affect on the environment. For this reason we aim to carry out at least 80% of our meetings via video conferencing tools. (We have some clients that we’ve never met in person!)
That said, face-to-face meetings can often be beneficial to the projects we’re working on, so there are occasions when we travel to our clients’ offices. In addition to that, we travel for in-person conferences and events and for our annual team trip.
To reduce the impact of our travel we:
- Travel by train whenever feasible.
- Hire an electric or hybrid vehicle when travelling by car.
- Travel together.
- Offset the greenhouse gas emissions from our travel.
What else can we do?
- Find an electric vehicle hire supplier
We store all of our files in the cloud using Box. Box’s primary data centre, which our files are stored on, runs on 100% renewable energy and they are in the process of moving the rest of their infrastructure to renewable data centres. Box’s ESG is available online: https://www.box.com/en-gb/about-us/esg
The websites we build are hosted either through AWS or Digital Ocean, both of whom are renewable datacentres. We also test our work with websitecarbon.com to measure and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of our deliveries. Methods for doing this are set out in this blog post, but include:
- Creating lightweight codebases
- Optimising imagery
- Removing or reducing video use
- Serving static HTML
- Making use of client- and server-side caching
What else can we do?
- We also use a number of web services to do our work, including Slack, Adobe Creative Cloud and Trello. The majority of these have sustainability or impact reports. We will review them and see if there are alternatives that are more sustainable.
Almost all of our computer hardware is made by Apple, who have been carbon neutral since 2020 and have plans in place for their products to be carbon neutral by 2030. Either way, we still offset any new hardware we purchase, just in case.
Apple are making sustainable changes elsewhere with their product range too, reducing the energy consumption of their products, removing unnecessary accessories such as USB plug sockets and headphones that most people already own.
When we need to replace hardware as it gets old, we do our best to give it to someone who can make further use of it, whether that’s through sending a laptop for refurbishment or simply by giving a mobile phone to someone who needs it.
What else can we do?
- Fully research the supply chain for smaller hardware such as mouses and USB Hubs
Every year we review the ownership of our suppliers and measure our spend with suppliers who are majority owned by women or underrepresented groups or are local to our head office.
Of all the purchases we made in the year ending 2021:
- we spent 54% with local businesses
- we spent 38% with businesses that were majority owned by women or underrepresented groups
What else can we do?
- Review the ethical scores of our suppliers, setting and adhering to a minimum score
- Find alternatives to Amazon and other known ‘bad eggs’
- More in-depth vetting of freelancers