Sustainability Competency & Opportunity Rating & Evaluation The SCORE sustainability assessment measures how well sustainability is integrated into your operations A powerful educational tool to help managers understand what sustainability means in their daily work

QuickLinks: What is SCORE • What's special about SCORE • SCORE assessment areas & sample items • How SCORE Works
• Licensed Assessors • Becoming Licensed • Pay for SCORE Report w/credit card

How SCORE Works

SCORE gathers an incredible amount of information in a short time. You can gather all the data in a 2 hour meeting. It is most commonly done in 4 meetings:

1. Briefing where we help you decide the best way to implement SCORE in your organization (usually 30-60 minutes, often with the key contact in the organization or the sustainability steering committee)
2. Data gathering meeting--usually 2 hours (usually with the management team and/or steering committee, plus others as appropriate)
3. Planning meeting where we deliver the report and help you build an action plan (usually 2 hours with the same individuals as step 2)
4. Six-month follow-up (usually 30-60 minutes; typically with the same individuals as step 1.)

SCORE Experts (specially trained individuals with deep knowledge of sustainability and its implementation) analyze your data, write a report with our observations, recommendations and associated resources. You get back:

• An Excel file with your results, the assessment items, and notes
• An MS Word report based on our expert analysis, showing your performance against an appropriate benchmark. We can benchmark you against all who have taken SCORE (recommended), major industry (eg., government, manufacturing, services), organization size (micro enterprise to multinational) or sustainability leaders.
• A PowerPoint presentation that summarizes our findings, making it easy for you to share the results with others
• A copy of The Business Guide to Sustainability (not included with SCORE for Small Business). We can substitute another of our books if you already own this text.

SCORE includes a separate assessment for each major sector (services, manufacturing, government) and as well as common organizational functions (top management, facilities, human resources, marketing, finance, etc.) Each sector is rated on roughly a dozen sustainability practices and the functions usually have about half-a-dozen practices. All together, there are over 100 practices to be rated. However, since they are organized the way organizations are organized, an individual manager only has to attend to a handful of practices.

SCORE Options

SCORE—The standard SCORE assessment is for organizations with over 50 employees that have begun the journey toward sustainability.

SCORE for Small Business — Fewer items, faster and more affordable; for organizations with fewer than 50 employees.

re-SCORE — This option is for repeat customers. In addition to the benchmark, we can compare your current results to the last time you took SCORE.

pre-SCORE—pre-SCORE is for customers who are so new to sustainability that they want to use SCORE to understand what sustainability means and build a plan for when to address the practices instead of rating themselves on the assessment.

SCORE as part of a larger sustainability assessment. SCORE assesses the degree to which you've incorporated sustainability into your business practices. However there may be other elements you want to assess (e.g., greenhouse gases, energy, waste, etc.) SCORE can be one part of a much larger sustainability assessment.

Do It Yourself—Anyone can purchase a copy of The Business Guide to Sustainability and use the paper-and-pencil version inside the book (for their own organization only; consultants are required to become licensed if they want to use SCORE in their practice). However, you will not get our expert analysis of your results, a formal report with our recommendations and associated resources, or charts showing how your results compare to others who have taken SCORE. Also, not all assessments are included in the book because the structure of the book is somewhat different than the assessment now.