Annesley interviewed Rob Harrison from Ethical Consumer, the longest standing organisation in this area. Their expert researchers draw on 3rd party journalistic sources combined with primary research. Although they publish a magazine for consumers, they also concentrate on directly changing companies through their reputation and links with many other NGOs. They are also looking in to opening up their database for invited NGOs and charities to contribute. As they charge for the data currently they do not feel that a fully open free system is the right path. The primary users of their fully-transparent service are NGOs rather than individuals.
Ethical Consumer magazine covers an area of products each month, distilled and elaborated on from the database of scored articles. It has a circulation of around 5 thousand and the website has around 40 thousand visits per month.
Fosfo (previously known as Citizens Market) is a community-driven web site helping consumers to know which are the best companies to support. Annesley interviewed Stephane de Messieres from Fosfo.
Stephane told us that Fosfo team have always had the attitude that expert-driven models are absolutely required for good benchmarking and strong analysis on the largest companies BUT those organisations will always find it hard to have comprehensive coverage that includes smaller brands – so that’s where crowdsourcing comes in. Fosfo allows users to review any company, right down to small local stores. In theory, a single site could combine both approaches, but in practise it might be difficult because the organisational culture is necessarily very different. A key differentiator of Fosfo is their focus on building their community, including experimenting with offline events such as game-testing the mechanics of their site.
Stephane agrees that there’s a need to constantly focus on expanding beyond the “core niche” and engaging more ethical consumers.
He believes that although there’s a lot of useful third-party sources out there, but it’s important not just to “scrape” the data but instead to encourage your community to cultivate and support these data sources.
Stephane points out that taking a purely information-driven approach suffers from a huge chicken-and-egg problem: users won’t contribute to an empty site because initially they won’t believe in it. But if there’s a playful, social element, that can be a motivator, right from the start.
Like many projects in our field, Fosfo is struggling to make the organisation work financially and is currently looking at how they can continue by scaling back on staff. We wish them the best of luck with that and look forward to collaborating in the future!
Annesley interviewed Dr Bill Pease from GoodGuide.
With several hundred thousand users, mobile phone apps and more than 150,000 products covered, the GoodGuide in the USA is an interesting group to watch. They use researchers and scientists to analyse mostly 3rd party quantitative data to assemble scores on companies in the usual areas of ethics. Their scoring methods are not transparent but their capacity to provide point-of-sale summary information to the user is very advanced.
They are beginning to toy with crowd sourcing by allowing users to query scores and present evidence to compliment theirs but only from the point of view of improving the data, not as a marketing exercise to create and spread involvement.
Bill Pease PhD from GoodGuide suggests that key common data points, like underlying data on political donations, could be standardised and shared but that format standards for general ethics data and scores will, and has consistently been, very difficult to agree on.
Here’s an interview with George Polisner, founder of Alonovo, a shopping site founded in 2005 that combines products from Amazon with ethical company information from sources such as KLD Research & Analytics, Inc., Social Accountability International and others.
George has been involved with our previous ECIS teleconferences but I asked him to give us an update on what Alonovo have been working on in the past year and the challenges they’re facing, as well as his thoughts on the way forward for organisations in this field.
Dr. Ellis Jones is the author of the Better World Shopping Guide, a handy pocket-sized book you can take with you when you go shopping which gives straightforward A+ to F ratings for common brands, based on their ethical performance. I first interviewed Ellis back in 2008 and he participated in our ECIS conference last year, but I wanted to get an update on what he’s been up to and what changes he sees in the world of ethical consumerism.
On Friday 16th July 2010 we held the first offline ECIS conference, in London. Dr. Ellis Jones had flown over from the States and Nick Ray had flown over from Australia, so it seemed like we should really take advantage of them both being in town simultaneously and organise a get-together. Annesley and I were also joined by Dr. Terry Newholm (University of Manchester) and Dr. Dorothea Kleine (University of London).
The conversation touched on a wide range of issues we all face in communicating ethical information to consumers. We webcast the panel discussion live – you can watch the first 45 minutes below. Alternatively you can download a higher-quality mp4 video. The second part of the discussion is available only as an audio mp3 file. (If these files do not display correctly in your browser, right-click, save link and then open in a media player).
Al Tepper has a background in publishing, where he focussed on how to create value in a world where an infinite amount amount of information is available free of charge. More recently, he’s been working with Natural Collection, an ethical online retailer, to launch Ooffoo.com, a community marketplace.
I asked Al to share his thoughts about how publishers and retailers alike can benefit from building an online community. You can download an Mp3 version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get the audio of these interviews as soon as they’re published.
Here’s an interview with Dr John Tepper Marlin from New York University. John told me about his wife‘s involvement in the “Council On Economic Priorities” and their publication “Shopping for a Better World“. He went on to talk about her current organisation, Social Accountability International, which seeks to establish an international standard for improving working conditions.
This interview is with Dr. Ellis Jones of the University of California, author of the Better World Shopper guide. Now available in iPod and dead-tree versions, this guide seeks to give shoppers a simple, practical guide to which high-street brands are the most ethical and which to avoid. Due to the pocket-size format, there’s not a lot space for references or explanation in the guide, but Dr. Jones gave me a glimpse into how the ratings are calculated. He’s interested in using the web to allow greater transparency and more global coverage.
In my ninth interview I spoke with Jake de Grazia from CarrotProject. He told me about their plan to approach subject experts and academics and ask them to contribute their opinions, then ask the community how much they trust each expert’s opinion. I think this approach mirrors what happens on Wikipedia, where most of the content seems to be created by a small number of specialists. Using the community as a trust filter is a thoroughly Web 2.0 re-take on the peer-review process.
