I’ve never worked for a Certified B Corporation® before. I’d seen the logo on products I know and love and always thought it was kind of cool that there were companies out there that were committed to “being good.” But I didn’t really know what it meant or why it mattered — or how hard it is to earn that little logo.
When I joined NerdPress in 2024 and learned that they (now we) were in the process of becoming a Certified B Corporation, I thought “wow, that’s neat!” But I still didn’t really know what it meant. Or why it mattered. It was this kind of nebulous concept about sustainability and not being evil.
What does it mean when a company says it believes business can be a force for good? Especially in the tech industry where we’re not delivering physical products and our supply chain is electronic and our people are remote so there’s no office space to green-ify.
It turns out being a B Corp is a lot more than just sustainability and “eco-friendliness.” And while we do pretty well in those categories as a digital business, it’s the other areas of B Corp certification that people don’t really think about where we shine.
An Impact Report — and this is both the first one NerdPress has ever produced and the first one I’ve ever written (as our newly minted “B Keeper”) — is supposed to be a recounting and explanation of how well the company met its goals in the previous year. Since 2025 was our first year of B Corp certification, 2026 sets the baseline we’ll work against as we near recertification in 2028.
One thing to note before we dive in, the points available to a company seeking certification are based on that company’s makeup, like the industry and number of employees, so our certification numbers per category might seem low if you’re just looking at the total. The important thing to know is that it takes 80 points to be certified (and the average company scores about 50…)
So now I’m going to talk about the categories and explain them a bit, how we did in each and where we’re going next, and I hope you’ll stick around because brevity is not a strength of mine… 😅
Environment
This seems like it would be an easy category for a fully-remote, non-product-based business to score well in. But not having a central office and not having products whose supply chains we can track means those points weren’t available to us at all.
Instead we looked at things like how efficient our communication tools are, how our travel policies impact our carbon usage, and whether buying refurbished equipment for team members would be better for the environment than buying brand new.
I buy used items, as much as feasible, to extend the life cycle of products. These are lightly used, perfectly functioning items that may have ended up in a landfill if not for these kinds of practices. I am proud to have helped with our Virtual Office Stewardship policy. This lays out a good foundation for sustainable practices and is the reason I was able to buy a used laptop instead of yet another new item.
We developed travel policies designed to reduce our carbon impact, like taking direct flights whenever possible, renting or ordering electric vehicles for ride sharing, and combining team-building trips with client-meeting trips (like conferences) so we’re traveling less but seeing each other more. Then we partner with We Are Neutral to calculate our actual carbon impact and purchase verified offsets for the things we can’t reduce through thoughtful actions. (There’s a lot of “greenwashing” in the carbon offset space, but We Are Neutral is doing real work to combat that, which is why we chose them.)
As we’ve gone through this year (and as we look toward 2027), we’re identifying ways we can reduce our carbon impact, particularly as the use of AI increases both for our team and globally. One example is being mindful of the models we use, favoring smaller, less token-heavy ones where possible, and putting thought into the tasks we let AI tools complete for us. If we can do it just as quickly ourselves, we’re not outsourcing to the robots. For example, AI crunched a lot of the numbers for me to be able to write this report, but all emdashes and parentheticals are my own.
We’re committed to being good stewards of the environment and finding ways to grow our business while minimizing and mitigating harm.
Workers
One of the things that drew me to NerdPress, from the moment I read the job listing, was “we take good care of not only our clients, but also ourselves and each other.” It’s easy for companies to say they value their employees; in fact, most companies probably do say they value their employees. But oftentimes that can start to feel like lip service.
I am the newest NerdPress hire and I’ve been here almost two years now (and I’ve told them all they’re stuck with me!). The average tenure for our team members is 5.3 years while the national average, as of 2024, was 3.5.
NerdPress is committed to equal pay, ensuring ample medical, sick, and/or family leave for team members (no matter their gender — dads get family leave too!), and regularly checks in with each of us via anonymous polling to make sure we have the support we need to do our jobs well.
All of this was in place before NerdPress became a B Corp, but the process of certification did reveal policies we had that hadn’t been written down yet, so now they’re in writing as part of our Team Handbook, serving as another lever for holding ourselves accountable to the people who make NerdPress a company that not only do great people want to work for but also one that great people want to do business with.
When you take care of your people, your people take care of your clients, and everyone wins.
We have bi-weekly “coffee chats” that are times for anyone available or interested to come together for non-work-related connection. We’ve done show-and-tell sessions with our favorite apps, built playlists together, and learned to pick locks.
So far this year we’ve begun instituting wellness challenges with weekly check-ins to remind one another to touch grass (aka take a walk) and hydrate. These sound so mundane, but when you’re a fully remote company with employees scattered across every US timezone (and occasionally Europe, if someone’s traveling!) the tiny moments of connection matter.
We’re continuing to take in team member feedback about how we can “keep improving,” and the leadership team meets regularly to discuss the ideas shared to figure out how to implement them.
Governance
Stakeholder governance is probably the hardest area for me to explain, and all of this work occurred before I got here, so I’m kicking this one over to Andrew:
I push back against the idea of “shareholder primacy” — the notion that profit is the only thing a business owes anyone. To be clear, I’m not anti-profit. But when profit is the only incentive a business has, you get bad behavior. Especially when other external costs, like impact on the environment, are borne by others.
While I’m the only shareholder at NerdPress, I’m not the only stakeholder, and that’s what our conversations about governance revolved around. NerdPress was already operating with all of our stakeholders in mind, so certification didn’t change how we make decisions, but it did give us better words for it.
One way we solidified our promise to our stakeholders was by becoming a California Benefit Corporation, which means we’re legally obligated to weigh the impact of our decisions on everyone they touch — our team, our clients, people who are neither, and the planet. (I’d put animals on that list, too!) I’m proud that this is now baked into NerdPress’s DNA.
I hold myself accountable in my daily life, and I want my business to do the same.
Filing to become a California Benefit Corporation was worth 10 of the total points available to us in this category, and I found it fascinating that the filing is tied to the company, not its owner.
If Andrew woke up tomorrow and decided to sell NerdPress (and this is just a hypothetical scenario so nobody spread rumors please and thanks, including you Google AI Overviews…), the requirement to think of people and the planet would go too.
Community
I’d been here less than a month when our annual giving drive kicked off, and it was one of the coolest experiences. So cool that we brought it back in 2025 and plan to keep giving this way indefinitely.
We compile a list of non-profits doing great work across categories like food insecurity, helping minority communities in tech, legal reform, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and pet rescue. Every organization that ends up on the list will receive a donation from us, but our team members get to vote for the three that matter most to them based on their own interests and passions, and donation amounts are distributed according to vote totals.
(My first year’s selections were The Bail Project, World Central Kitchen, and The Okra Project, and I cried when I saw the breadth of categories on the list. [Yes, I’m serious.])
At this year’s Tastemaker, we partnered with Cloudflare to bring pups from Wags & Walks, a local LA animal rescue, to the event, and it was the highlight of the weekend for many. (And they definitely still have wonderful, adoptable, adorable dogs!)
We also support the Food and Wellness Equity Collective in their endeavors to educate, uplift, and grow the businesses of underrepresented creators in the food blogging industry, and we make it a point to give back by providing pro-bono WordPress support to various youth and outdoor/conservation organizations.
One of the things we’ve been pondering, and will continue to consider, is what community can (or should, however much we try not to use that word around here) mean for NerdPress.
Is it the individual communities where our team members live? Is it the greater WordPress ecosystem, where every performance bug Heather finds and fixes for our clients improves the internet for everyone?
The likely answer is that it’s both and more, and internally we’re exploring how we define community so that we can better serve the ones we touch.
Customers
Last, but not least, is the Customers category. (We call you “clients” so that’s what I’ll call you from here on out in this section.)
Clients — you — are the reason we do what we do. And next to our incredible team members, you’re the reason for our success, which is not something we take lightly.
One of our core values is “be proactive,” so to do that better, we launched a new program in 2025: Client Success. And launching a new program meant it would need a leader, so Pat Costa became our Client Success Program Manager.
So far he’s led projects that have impacted every single client site we support, like removing unused plugins (with your approval!) and our nearly-complete Yoast SEO audit project.
The entire purpose of Pat’s role is that we’re reaching out to you about things that can positively impact your business before you have to ask us. We’re looking for the things that will help you grow because we see ourselves as partners in your success, and we hope you see us that way too.
We’re going to continue identifying projects like these (and have a few in the pipeline already!), rooted in WordPress best practices, and always with the goal of staying ahead of things you didn’t even know could be improved.
So what comes next?
For us, we’re getting more involved in the B Corp community. Andrew attended Champions Retreat in April (the B Corp conference), and I’m headed to BLD Southeast to network with and learn from others who are farther along in this journey than we are.
There is no singular way to be a B Corp, so we’re going to keep figuring out the “B corp-y” ways to accomplish our goals, knowing that this will always be a continual process and never a final destination.
The fine print: Our benefit corporation disclosures
As a California Benefit Corporation, we’re required to share a few things each year, and keeping them out in the open is part of the point.
Our benefit purpose
Forgive us, but our accountant wrote this part (and the State of California makes us include it):
The purpose of the corporation is to engage in any lawful act or activity for which a corporation may be organized under the General Corporation Law of California other than the banking business, the trust company business or the practice of a profession permitted to be incorporated by the California Corporations Code. The corporation is a benefit corporation.
More plainly said: We’re committed to creating a material positive impact on society and the environment, measured against an independent third-party standard.
Our third-party standard
We assess our performance using the B Impact Assessment administered by B Lab, an independent and transparent standard aligned with our mission. NerdPress has no financial or governance connection to B Lab beyond standard certification and membership fees.
Where we fell short
Flights accounted for 55% of our overall carbon footprint (which rose 18% over 2024), so the travel policies we wrote to bring that number down haven’t done it yet. We also didn’t have anyone whose actual job it was to watch this until the B Keeper title existed, which is part of why our 2025 carbon numbers took five months to assemble. And B Lab has retired the point-scoring model we certified under, so this baseline won’t line up neatly with recertification in 2028.
