EcoVadis

Background

Since its founding in 2007, EcoVadis has grown to become the world’s largest and most trusted provider of business sustainability ratings, creating a global network of more than 100,000+ rated companies.

Challenge

As the provider of the world’s most trusted business sustainability rating system, EcoVadis wanted to offer organizations a path towards improving their performance across a range of standards in environment, ethics, labor and human rights and sustainable procurement.

The team identified 27 topic areas aligned to the EcoVadis scorecard that could help organizations navigate sustainability regulations and offer them practical guidance on how they can improve their performance.

Key to this performance need was offering organizations that had received a sustainability rating clear direction on what they should change and how they could go about doing so.

In other words, if the scorecard indicates that a business doesn’t meet the standard in ‘ethics’ because of the barriers placed before whistleblowers, they will be directed towards learning content that will help them create a fairer and more robust whistleblowing procedure.

Solution

Potential Audience

Technology Solution

EcoVadis serves a global audience of organizations large and small. With no control over the technology used by customers, it was essential that this content solution was accessible on all devices and was lightweight, flexible and robust.

Developed using the Articulate Rise authoring tool and deployed via a Learning Management System (LMS), Academy content can be accessed via single sign-on from the EcoVadis rating platform. This one-click journey between the scorecard and targeted content lowers barriers to learning.

Courses on the academy are split into microlearning chapters lasting between 5 and 10 minutes. They’re specifically designed to be flexible around the workloads of busy decision-makers and offer practical advice that can be actioned between chapters.

Implementation Strategy

Not only was the Academy project huge in scale, but it also needed to be developed at pace. By taking an agile approach to development and working in a more collaborative fashion, we were able to create around one hour of content every week from Spring 2021 until the end of the year.

Starting simply with a blank page, a learning objective and the time of an SME, EcoVadis’s own Learning Designers partnered with designers and developers at Learning Pool to rapidly create chapters in short sprints. This development methodology enabled EcoVadis to launch content on the Academy almost immediately.

This type of partnership can be notoriously difficult to pull off but thanks to the dedication and talent of teams on both sides of the relationship, we established a pattern of working that not only enabled the rapid creation of content but also helped us push the boundaries of the authoring tool.

Since its creation, the Academy has been promoted directly with customers and partners and on the EcoVadis website to maximize uptake.

Outcomes

In late 2021, the EcoVadis Academy was launched and there is a high correlation demonstrating dramatic improvement in the performance among the 13,000 companies who have taken Academy courses.

Developed in partnership with Learning Pool, the Academy is huge in scale. With over 30 hours of content created and available in 9 languages, the learning has reached over 18,000 learners in more than a hundred countries and earned an NPS score of +43.

Effectiveness and Impact on Performance

EcoVadis’s mission is to enable all companies to reduce risk, drive improvement and accelerate their positive impact on our planet and society. Success for this initiative meant seeing real measurable change in the actions and policies of businesses verified by the world’s leading sustainability experts. The EcoVadis Academy delivered!

At the center of our impact assessment is the EcoVadis Sustainability Rating. Aligned with international standards and customized to industry, size and country, the rating provides a thorough assessment of a business’s sustainability performance.

In practice, an improvement in a company’s sustainability rating may come from broad actions like measuring and reporting greenhouse gas emissions to specific progress in these areas such as reductions in business travel emissions.

EcoVadis found that the 1,369 organizations that have engaged with the Academy’s learning content so far have made significant improvements to their business’s sustainability practices. The more courses they completed, the more significant that improvement.

This table shows that organizations that completed five or more courses on the Academy improved their reassessment scores by 70%. This means organizations are making real improvements verified by experts. This ranges from ensuring the sustainability of supply chains to improving their own policies and procedures on ethics and human rights.

Innovation and Originality

To deliver this kind of impact, it’s essential that the Academy provides engaging and actionable learning experiences. With so many learning objectives to meet, the team opted for a micro-learning approach with no single chapter of learning lasting longer than 10 minutes.

Each micro-learning experience was packed with animated content and, where more novel interactions were of value, Articulate Storyline blocks. These interactive elements helped pushed the boundaries of the main authoring tool (Rise) whilst ensuring every minute of the experience was accessible to all users.

The inclusion of animated gifs and activities throughout each chapter made every page feel alive with movement and activity and chimed perfectly with the main EcoVadis brand.

Chapters were accompanied by actionable checklists and customer stories to help learners come up with practical actions for their business to improve its own sustainability score.

High Engagement

The Academy has seen a high level of engagement since its launch with almost 20,000 learners using the service to help improve their organization’s sustainability rating. Those learners who have accessed the Academy not only love the content on offer but are taking practical steps within their organizations.

With this high level of engagement within its first year of launch, the EcoVadis academy is able to help us move towards a global marketplace where sustainability intelligence influences every business decision – improving economies, people’s lives and the planet we all depend on.