Research and advisory businesses, Kantar, PwC Australia, and Glow, are integrating a standardised metric, the Social Responsibility Score (SRS), into their services as they look to meet growing demand for sustainability transparency across Australian organisations.

The SRS is a perception measure of sustainability ROI, backed by over 25 million brand interviews over the past four years. The metric captures feedback from consumers, customers, employees, or investors and can be benchmarked across brands, geographies, and time. It's designed to help business leaders link sustainability to customer and employee loyalty. This integration comes as investment in ESG/sustainability programs continues to rise due to legislative compliance, shareholder expectations, employee demands, and evolving consumer behaviour.

"SRS makes it easier to quantify the commercial impact of sustainability efforts," Glow CEO, Tim Clover, said. "The lack of standardised global measures to gauge stakeholder response to ESG/sustainability efforts has made it hard for businesses to prove ROI on sustainability programs and hampered investment up until now. We are excited that Kantar and PwC Australia are supporting SRS. The more we all speak the same language, the more positive impact can be created for businesses, the communities they serve, and the environment.”

Kantar and PwC Australia are integrating SRS into their existing measurement and transformation solutions to enrich their offer to clients. SRS is being evaluated and piloted by five other global research and advisory businesses for integration with their solutions. SRS data is utilised within ongoing research programs, supported by Cint, NIQ (Nielsen IQ) and publisher 3BL Media, that seek to determine the ROI of sustainability efforts.

“We hear often from clients that they need a simple, common language for measuring sustainability, which is why we support this industry-wide opportunity to maximise our impact," Kantar global leader for Sustainable Transformation Jonathan Hall, said. "No agency can solve this problem on its own. We have already integrated SRS into tracking for one of our global clients and can see how it adds value to our existing comprehensive measurement framework. We are happy to be collaborating across the industry on a standard metric that promotes positive action.”

PwC Australia Markets Leader, Tom Gunson, said quantifying social and environmental risk is now an imperative for boards and executives.

"Taking an evidence-based approach to measuring the effects of ESG actions on all stakeholders is new and exciting. Combining consumer-driven data with our ESG, analytics and consulting solutions provides new insights on what is working well and what areas require more focus.”

SRS was developed by research-technology business Glow and is available for licensing to research and advisory businesses.