Demystifying InfluenceMap
As polarization increases, companies today are facing ever more political scrutiny in the US from all sides. On this topic, our CEO Erik Wohlgemuth’s latest blog, celebrating Future 500’s 30th Anniversary, offers insight into how we see this challenging dynamic.
In this blog, we’ll take a moment to look at one side of that scrutiny, and examine how the environmental community often views companies through assessments of their climate lobbying—with one NGO, InfluenceMap, arguably the most prominent rater and ranker in this space.
As more companies (both within and outside our Corporate Affinity Network) have approached our team in recent months for insights into how they are being assessed on climate policy engagement, we thought it would be helpful to unpack InfluenceMap’s methodology to better enable corporate leaders to understand how to effectively engage their organizations.
The Context:
InfluenceMap’s assessments of corporate climate policy engagement are widely cited by the media, environmental NGOs, and ESG/SRI investors—of note, informing the Climate Action 100+ investor coalition’s priorities. InfluenceMap has extensive philanthropic support, publicly disclosing a list of 18 funders across the US and EU, providing it with solid financial backing to continue its work into the future, regardless of political polarization.
InfluenceMap’s Methodology:
InfluenceMap assesses the “climate policy engagement” of individual corporations and industry associations through a platform called LobbyMap, producing four “scores” that collectively form a company's overall assessment. If you spend a moment with LobbyMap’s methodology, you’ll see that it is very detailed and complex. The following bullet points provide a high-level overview to help you understand the topline points so you can better navigate the methodology:
Data Sources: LobbyMap uses seven publicly available data sources, which include items like corporate reports and disclosures, comments submitted to regulators and policymakers (including those obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests), comments from management and leadership, and reports of a company’s climate policy engagement from “reliable” and “well-established” media outlets. LobbyMap shares that the “criteria for selecting these data sources are that they must be publicly accessible, applicable to all entities within our assessed universe, and reliable representations of corporate activities and behavior.”
Volume of Data: LobbyMap claims its process can collect hundreds of individual data points on any specific company, providing a “robust basis to assess” a company’s climate policy engagement. Collectively, LobbyMap says it “captures and assesses over 30,000 items of evidence each year.”
Definition of Climate Policy Engagement: LobbyMap uses the UN's Guide for Responsible Corporate Engagement in Climate Policy to inform what constitutes engagement. This can include: advertising, social media, public relations, sponsoring research, direct contact with regulators and elected officials, funding of campaigns and political parties, and participation in policy advisory committees.
Policy Preferences: LobbyMap shares that its “methodology is designed to be ‘policy neutral,’ and InfluenceMap does not take internal positions on the best climate policy. Instead, the scoring system measures corporate positions against external, authoritative benchmarks.”
Specifically, it benchmarks companies against “the policy and technology pathways highlighted through the research of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as necessary to deliver the Paris Agreement’s goal ‘to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2°C and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.’”
Scoring: For relevant data points, LobbyMap scores a company’s level of ‘support’ or ‘opposition’ to Paris-aligned climate policies, with guidance on specific sector policies. Measurements are assigned numerical values ranging from -2 (strong opposition) to +2 (strong support), and LobbyMap produces extensive, publicly available tables that share its measurements for every company it assesses. LobbyMap uses this data to produce four “scores” that collectively form a company’s assessment:
Organization Score – A measure of how supportive or obstructive the company’s direct engagement is towards science-aligned climate policy.
Relationship Score – A measure of how supportive or obstructive the company’s industry associations are towards science-aligned climate policy.
Performance Band – A full measure of a company’s climate policy engagement, accounting for both its own engagement and that of its industry associations.
Engagement Intensity – A measure of how active a company or industry association is in its direct climate policy engagement activities, providing a measure of the “strategic importance an organization places on climate policy within its advocacy program.”
Frequency of Updates: LobbyMap says its database is updated on a week-to-week basis, and that data “is collected up to five years before the date of the assessment, with the most recent evidence carrying the most weight.”
All together, LobbyMap seeks to assess a company's real-world support for "Paris-Aligned climate policies" and produce comparable scores across the four scoring categories to numerically evaluate and benchmark companies against one another.
Want more information? InfluenceMap maintains a detailed methodology page, which can be found at: https://lobbymap.org/briefing/LobbyMap-Methodology-24422
The Crux:
As shared above, InfluenceMap’s LobbyMap platform assesses companies against the “Paris-aligned” policy pathways outlined by the IPCC. Companies, for various reasons, may diverge or disagree with the IPCC’s public policy conclusions. When those policy preferences genuinely diverge, there may be little a company can do to improve its InfluenceMap rating.
Walking a Tightrope:
A poll by Third Side Strategies (formerly the Erb Institute Corporate Political Responsibility Taskforce) found that:
78% of Government Relations Executives and Chief Legal Officers surveyed view the political environment for companies as very or extremely challenging;
Over 50% of those surveyed expect backlash over their public affairs activities.
On the topic of climate lobbying, companies can expect scrutiny from both the environmental community (informed by InfluenceMap’s assessments) as well as from stakeholder communities on the political right, who may want companies to take a different approach. That presents a tightrope to walk, and so we recommend checking out Third Side Strategies for advice on how to do so.
Transparency Disclosure: Future 500 is a fiscal sponsor of Third Side Strategies, which is a “non-partisan action-oriented think tank and non-profit advisory firm” that “helps companies reduce risk and deliver results by aligning public affairs with long-term value for business and society.” Find out more at: https://thecprhub.org/
Bottom Line:
InfluenceMap’s methodology is highly complex, but what’s most important to understand is that it seeks to assess a company's apparent real-world support for "Paris-aligned climate policies" and produce comparable, numerical scores to reflect that. It has a base of solid philanthropic support, which we anticipate will enable it to continue its work regardless of increasing political polarization and scrutiny in the US and globally. Companies would be well-served by familiarizing themselves with the methodology and their rating. And, facing pressure from many sides, utilizing resources from organizations like Third Side Strategies to help craft a thoughtful and holistic path forward on policy engagement.
Future 500 is a non-profit consultancy that builds trust between companies, advocates, investors, and philanthropists to advance business as a force for good. We specialize in stakeholder engagement, sustainability strategy, and responsible communication. From stakeholder mapping to materiality assessments, partnership development to activist engagement, target setting to CSR reporting strategy, we empower our partners with the skills and relationships needed to systemically tackle today's most pressing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) challenges.
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