October Scott smiling into the camera with s sleek new buzz cut and a burgundy collared shirt
October ScottContent Specialist

Six Advantages of Partnering with a Certified Benefit Corporation

As a member of the Marzano Research team, I have to admit—I’m pretty darn proud of this company. We’re a women-owned small business dedicated to working with educators and system leaders, and our mission is to help them learn, evolve, and thrive.

Certified since 2019 as a Benefit Corporation, we’ve made a bold commitment to expanding our purpose beyond the financial bottom line.

The work we do is rooted in our belief that education can transform lives. We’re dedicated to doing good and helping our education system continue to do more good, every day.

We support leaders of systems in examining their data and identifying changes they need to make to better serve their students—and then we work with them to plan and implement those changes.

We help educators identify evidence-based strategies that are likely to transform their classrooms and help them evaluate the impact of implementation.

We assist organizations in bringing the voice of their community and stakeholders into the work they’re doing to better meet educational needs.

Three color blocks with text and icons. The 1st has an icon of hands holding a group of people and reads

We provide tailored professional learning and coaching to support educators in implementing evidence-based practices, building capacity, and addressing unique learning needs.

And we also care deeply about being part of a forward-thinking community of companies that expand the traditional purpose of a business to encompass social and environmental impacts.

The criteria from our certifier, Benefit Corporations for Good, are based on the “triple bottom line”—social responsibility, environmental responsibility, and business responsibility.

Guiding our mission with these priorities doesn’t only benefit our team, the planet, and the educators and learners our work impacts. It also offers our partners several unique advantages.

Why partner with a Certified Benefit Corporation?

  1. Align with your purpose-driven values: By choosing to work with a benefit corporation, you signal your own commitment to making a positive social and environmental impact.
  2. Go green: When you partner with us, you minimize your carbon footprint. We use paperless systems for our operations, prioritize eco-friendly purchasing decisions and travel practices, recycle, and follow a company-wide sustainability policy.
  3. Work with top talent: Our team is highly skilled, tight-knit, passionate, and dedicated. Research from McKinsey has found that companies like ours are better able to attract and retain top-tier employees who care about doing purpose-driven work. According to that study, employees who view their work as meaningful exhibit a 33% boost in their job performance, are 75% more committed to their organization, and 49% less inclined to leave their current roles.
  4. Get higher-quality work from a diverse team: Research has shown that teams with diverse backgrounds, cultures, and viewpoints are more creative and productive. Additionally, diverse groups make more accurate decisions than homogenous groups because they focus more closely on facts, challenge each other’s perspectives, and maintain greater objectivity, leading to improved information processing and more effective conclusions.
  5. Access innovative solutions: Our purpose-driven approach fuels our continuous improvement and drives us to develop new and better ways to support our partners and the communities they serve.
  6. Trust our increased transparency and accountability: As a benefit corporation, we undergo annual third-party assessments to ensure we are meeting our social, environmental, and business performance goals.

So, if you’re looking for a partner who shares your values and is dedicated to making real, sustainable change, read our 2023 Annual Benefit Report to learn more about how we met our benefit corporation goals last year and how we’re building on that progress in 2024. Then, get in touch to discuss how we can work together to drive improvement in education.

Sources

Bromley, T., Lauricella, T., and Schaninger, B. (2021, June 28). Making work meaningful from the C-suite to the frontline. McKinsey and Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-organization-blog/making-work-meaningful-from-the-c-suite-to-the-frontline

Rock, D., and Grant, H. (2016, November 4). Why Diverse Teams are Smarter. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter