What is Aspiration Impact Measurement?
Aspiration Impact Measurement (AIM) is a first of its kind way for you to see your own personalized sustainability score based on how your daily spending impacts people and the planet.
AIM provides scores based on the social and environmental impact of the businesses at which you spend your money. We look at how a business treats People (employees, customers and community) and the Planet (environment). Click here to learn more about AIM.
Why was AIM created?
AIM was created so that we can all think about how our everyday spending can make the world a better place. Every day, Americans spend a total of $55.98 billion. All businesses, through the process of creating and selling products and services, have an impact on people – their employees, customers, and the community – and on the planet. However, until now we don’t have an easy way to tell which businesses are doing the right things for People and the Planet. With AIM, anyone can easily view this data for their daily transactions. By using this data to help us spend with a conscience, we can encourage businesses to adopt better policies and practices.
Why is AIM revolutionary?
For the first time in history, we are providing everyone with the ability to see their own daily impact by directly embedding sustainability scores into customers’ transaction data. This gives you an easy way to find out if a business’s social and environmental practices align with your values – and allows you to adjust your spending habits accordingly. Investors have long benefited from data on businesses’ social and environmental practices to help them make better investment decisions. Now you, as an individual, can benefit from this data as well, by using it to make better spending decisions.
How do you judge what metrics are important?
There is an increasing body of research that shows how businesses that track and set out to improve their social and environmental impact perform better over the long-run. At Aspiration, we like to call these High Road businesses.
The characteristics of High Road businesses include:
(1) pro-employee and pro-environment practices, (2) proactively considering negative factors and avoiding behavior associated with lawsuits, fines, boycotts, and reputational harm, and (3) long-term thinking and innovation, in order to be efficient, profitable, and to pioneer industry best practices.
Based on these characteristics, we’ve selected metrics that help us assess how well businesses are doing at being High Road businesses.
In addition to selecting metrics that evaluate a business’s policies and practices, we look at metrics that assess the social and environmental impact of the products and services a business offers.
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