Empowering change through Company Social Responsibility
Environmental, Social & Governance
This lays out Embrosa's vision of "Corporate" Social Responsibility (CSR) and creates clarity for all of Embrosa's stakeholders: current and future shareholders, employees, customers, and collaborative partners.
Real Value Creation
Since founding Embrosa in 2016, Rogier van den Berg and Melanie van Norden have pursued two things: large-scale economic return and noticeable social impact. Both concern value creation.
If Embrosa only realizes large-scale returns and perhaps even leaves a negative impact on the world around it, the value creation is unbalanced and even destructive. Without economic return, any positive impact Embrosa can make on the world is not sustainable.
We at Embrosa:
Our promise to stakeholders:
- believe that we are only successful if we make both financial and social impact.
- promise to measure not only our financial performance, but also the social and environmental performance of our operations.
- decide only after considering both the financial and social impact of our actions.
- organize everything we do in a way that maximizes our positive impact and minimizes our negative impact on the world.
- donate 1% of our capacity to charities that align with the social impact we want to make.
Thereby, we let our CSR execution and impact grow step-by-step with the growth of our company. "We dream big, but start small.
Purpose and profit go hand in hand.
Local economies
- At Embrosa, we believe in the power of local communities. Communities create connections. When people from different backgrounds and with different beliefs get to know each other, it breeds mutual understanding. Communities also provide public facilities and unite people behind collective interests.
- The local economy is an important driver for healthy communities. By boosting the local economy, we can directly increase the quality of life locally. In our view, local entrepreneurs are the beating heart of a local community. Every town and village needs a healthy mix of businesses. This creates jobs, connections, and a healthy buzz.
- We see many entrepreneurs struggling to keep up with rapid changes. The shift from physical to online stores is a significant influence, but digitalization and economies of scale mean that small local businesses can no longer compete on a level playing field with large corporations. Local and independent entrepreneurship is becoming less and less attractive, leading to a decline in the entrepreneurial landscape and our villages and cities.
- We aim to bridge this gap. Our social value lies in influencing consumers to support local businesses. Through hyper-local advertisements, we promote local entrepreneurs among consumers and seek to change their shopping behavior.
Financial and social impact
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
What is a 'good' social impact? We align ourselves with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which we consider to be an objective description of the impact established by the United Nations. The 3 Sustainable Development Goals we can impact most:
- 11. Sustainable cities and communities: Our goal is to maintain healthy and livable urban and peripheral communities by promoting local entrepreneurs to local consumers.
- 12. Sustainable production and consumption: Our business model conflicts with this SDG as advertisements often encourage excessive consumption. However, we prefer to promote craftsmanship and sustainable products that have a longer lifespan. We are gradually shifting our focus to promoting sustainable brands, products, and services in our campaigns.
- 10. Reduce inequality: We are committed to being an inclusive company and contributing to a more inclusive society. We believe that diversity in terms of age, gender, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion, and economic background enriches our company and society. Our policies aim to promote greater equality.
Financial, social and environmental performance
Measuring our social impact
To operate sustainably, we need to consider the social, economic, and environmental impacts of our organizational activities. We believe that accounting should not only focus on creating financial value. By transitioning to impact accounting, we can also account for the social value that Embrosa creates, leading us to make better decisions. As a result, we are committed to measuring our social impact.
- Phase 1 involves reporting our annual performance according to the SDGs through a simple tool, which is feasible for Embrosa's smaller startup team.
- Phase 2 will be implemented one year after a CFO joins Embrosa. At that point, we aim to start using the Integrated Profit & Loss (IP&L) methodology following Impact Weighted Accounts (IWAs).
Financial and social impact
The right people on board
Our company's Annual General Meeting of Shareholders (AGM) will consider both social value and financial value when making important decisions. While we could rely on rules for safeguarding, we prefer to establish principles and core values, which will serve as the basis for our decision-making framework.
As a result, we choose to only involve shareholders who share our belief that generating financial value is closely linked to preserving and enhancing social value.
Maximize our positive impact and minimize our negative impact
Guiding principles
We are guided by our core values and follow three simple principles:
- We don't take more than we need. We use resources sparingly, including money and raw materials, taking only what we need. Efficiency is key for us.
- We think in terms of abundance rather than scarcity. We therefore like to share. Our knowledge. But also Embrosa's value creation with our employees.
- We listen to customers. Our customers are (the most) important stakeholders, so we always listen to them
We donate 1%
currently we donate 'In Kind'
We support charities that support an inclusive world, that contribute to a level-playing field, and charities that support that livability in communities.
In 2024, we have decided to support Just Diggit
See the people behind Embrosa
'The Embrosians'
We are Embrosa, and we call ourselves The Embrosians. We are a remote, energetic, and curious team that believes in helping high streets thrive with simple yet innovative software.