About LBG

LBG was developed in 1994 by a group of executives from socially involved UK companies who wanted to find out how much they were investing in the community and what impact their programs were reaching.

At the time, corporate executives were looking for an answer to these questions:

1. What is the real value of their company’s contributions?
2. How do other companies implement similar programs?
3. What changes do these projects bring:

• to the company?
• to the community?

The answers provided sensible points looked at from a business impact angle and set the basis for the LBG framework. At present, London Benchmarking Group (LBG) is the most elaborate service that measures corporate community involvement (CCI) based on contributions from members who work together in order to:

• Measure and share their practice;
• Develop and improve measurement tools;
• Improve their CCI project implementation and management;
• Communicate CCI initiative outputs as efficiently to company stakeholders and to other LBG groups.

LBG is used by hundreds of first-class international companies like Vodafone, HSBC, Barclays, etc. and on important markets such as Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, The UK, Spain, and Asia. Corporate professionals use it as their main source of consistent and comparable information on corporate contributions in cash, in-kind, volunteer time and management time. Moreover, LBG is used as a tool to track initiative-led long-term results and impacts to communities and to the company.

Given the quality of the information resulting from this reporting model, some model components are also used by Dow Jones Sustainability Index to evaluate corporate performance.

What is LBG?

LBG works as a group of companies involved in community programs trying to understand and improve their efficiency. The peculiarity of the measurement and reporting model is that it takes into account corporate community involvement projects exclusively. The other CSR practice components that companies may feature are not scrutinized by LBG evaluation.

The basic principles, which help delineate corporate community projects, are the following:

1. The contributions to be measured are those made from a desire to bring about community change (they are not subject to law or business agreements).
2. The underlying project motivation must be accurately communicated as it influences the bottom-line and the measurement process.
3. Only the information that the company is certain about is reported. If there are doubts about the validity of any information, it will be left out of the reporting.
4. The contribution value is quantified against the company’s production cost, not against the selling price.