Our Journey to Net Zero
Raisely is an online fundraising platform for ambitious charities across the world. We empower thousands of charities across the world to take control of their revenue and improve the wellbeing of people and our planet.
The easy bit
The question of whether we wanted to reach net zero was easily answered.
We are and always have been about people and planet so having net zero carbon emissions was a logical next step.
As an award-winning B Corp, we had already joined over 500 other B Corps in committing to Net Zero by 2030. But in the name of ‘getting things done’ and ‘no time like the present’, we figured, why wait until then? One of the benefits of being a smaller company is being nimble and flexible, so we figured, why not give it a crack?
This sparkly idea quickly turned into a pile of work as we delved into the research, learning about the GHG Protocol, Gold Standard, Science-Based Targets, COP 25, SDG 13 and the list (and acronyms) goes on.
Measuring our footprint
As we moved into the phase of measuring our carbon footprint, we found it difficult to find other companies who were fully remote, dispersed globally and in the digital marketplace.
While realising our structure was looking positive for our carbon footprint, we became aware of the challenge it would be to measure our footprint accurately.
Enter the wonderful consultants at Carbon Neutral who partnered with us to understand our company, sift through our operations and provided the standards and frameworks to calculate our company’s emissions.
It was important to us that we did this process in a considered and robust way and having experts on hand gave us this confidence.
Next up was spreadsheet time and lots of questions for our team.
Everything from how we commute to co-work space, listing out every address you’ve had in the year (much more challenging for our digital nomads and for those who made COVID adjustments), to our electricity companies. We then accounted for every time we jumped in an Uber to every detail of our staff retreat.
It was a long process so thankfully I love a spreadsheet! It was a good day when we could finally shoot that off to our consultant to start crunching the numbers.
We sat back as our wonderful consultant translated this into meaningful data. Then the report came back - 51 tonnes of carbon.
How did we offset?
For 2020, we have elected Gold Standard offsets as this is a globally recognised and trusted regulatory framework. The Gold Standard takes a market based ‘payment for outcomes’ approach, ensuring that projects achieve genuine outcomes that deliver as much impact as possible. Every project certified by The Gold Standard must monitor, report and verify carbon savings and sustainable development benefits for local communities.
The Yarra Yarra Biodiversity Corridor Project is the first premium Gold Standard certified project in Australia. It is certified to remove 1.059M tonnes of CO2-e from the atmosphere for over 50 years. This year, we have purchased all our offset credits from this project.
There’s so much more we aspire to achieve in this area of our business but for now, we’re taking a moment to clink our glasses to the progress we’ve made 🥂