Making benchmarking data more transparent, accessible, and impactful

High quality, easily accessible data is an essential component in accelerating corporate efforts towards sustainable business practices. Only with data readily available to all, can we start to better understand how companies are reporting, and whether that translates into action and accountability. The World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) is in the midst of a transformation, with intense focus on the transparency and standardisation of benchmarking data to ensure it is impactful for all. The consolidation of our datasets, methodologies and guidelines into a single centralised repository is the first step in this transformation, with much more to come.

Data has always been at the core of WBA’s theory of change. Since our founding, we have published more than 20 benchmarks and assessed over 1600 companies, with the goal to assess all the SDG2000 companies by 2024. Initially, our efforts were primarily focused on data collection and the resulting assessments of companies’ performance. We learnt that benchmarking at scale requires clean data and documentation, efficient research processes and clear data management practices. As a result, and as we approach our assessment goal, we are laying the foundations for future scaling and strengthening of our work.

What’s new?

These foundational efforts aren’t just for our benefit – we’ve heard your feedback that it can be difficult to locate and compare data from across the universe of WBA benchmarks. As a first step on our journey to greater data transparency, we have consolidated all our datasets, methodologies, guidelines and reports into a single catalogue on our website. You can locate it with a simple, memorable link – data.worldbenchmarkingalliance.org

On this updated page you will be able to easily locate all of our available information and narrow by your area(s) of interest using the filter options as applicable.

Looking ahead to the next couple of years and beyond, we aim to pivot from simply producing a great volume of data, to also producing insights based on that data. Moreover, critical to our theory of change and to the acceleration of improved corporate practice is that we enable everyone to use this data and generate powerful, thought-provoking, change-creating information.

A statement of intent

We’re not there yet – we are at the start of the journey, laying the foundations of transparency that are essential for everything to follow. It is our intention that over the coming months and years all our stakeholders will see rapid developments in the standardisation of WBA data, the granularity of disclosure and the simplification of our research approach. We will continue to streamline access paths to all this information, including publicly available data analysis and visualisation tools, along with APIs for integration into your own applications and workflows.

We still have a long way to go, but we welcome your input at every stage of the journey. We hope you find the updated data and insights catalogue useful, and as ever please do reach out if you’d like to talk.