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FAQ - The reference site for responsible companies
A difficult start for pioneers in 2015
When Rate A Company launched in 2015, we received a great many threats to have the site shut down: many companies did not want to be assessed by their stakeholders on environmental and social criteria.
Since the French Sapin II Act on whistleblower protection, which requires companies with more than 50 employees to set up a channel for anonymously reporting breaches of regulations, the threatening messages have fallen silent.
Since Covid, more and more companies have begun their transition to a more sustainable strategy. Keen to become exemplary brands that attract the best candidates, several have registered free of charge to be spontaneously assessed on our site and to showcase their initiatives. We congratulate these visionary, transparent and caring companies for leading by example.
Listing every organisation, across every sector, so that its impact can be assessed
There was no rating site based on the values of CSR (corporate social responsibility). Yet CSR is part of our buying habits, our regulations and our professional environment in general.
Like hotel and restaurant sites, we want to highlight companies that stand out for their approach rather than their marketing budgets. We have simply chosen sustainability criteria instead of sleep quality and location (which naturally count in the hotel trade). More than 80 criteria based on ISO 26000, ISO 20400, the SDGs and the CSRD are therefore submitted to stakeholders for assessment.
Anyone can register free of charge and rate a company whose positioning they appreciate or, conversely, register to denounce bad practices that need to change.
Adding a company that is not yet listed is easy
We have more than 1.7 million companies in our database. However, your organisation, or the one you want to assess, may be recent. If your search turns up nothing, you can add it without much trouble.
If you are a stakeholder of the company, there is no need to fill everything in: enter the minimum and our teams will take care of the rest.
If you are the organisation’s legal representative or one of its senior managers, we invite you to be as precise as possible when completing the company page, to avoid the information being entered incorrectly.
The good news is that you can also add companies from all four corners of the world!
An assessment of CSR criteria based on your experience with the organisation
A few years ago, when ISO 9001 on customer relations appeared, it seemed unthinkable to business leaders to ask their customers what they thought of their products and services.
Then, little by little, the companies that adopted its principles saw the benefits: they responded faster to customer expectations, which change ever more quickly. Companies that comply with ISO 9001 build a relationship with their customers, earn their loyalty and anticipate expectations and conflicts.
It took time, but today most companies have adopted this method.
We are making the same bet on everyone’s participation, based on sustainability criteria. Because CSR rests on 3 pillars (People, Planet, Profit), we invite people to assess companies against several criteria linked to these pillars.
We have therefore defined 6 main profiles, each answering its own specific criteria: customers do not answer the same criteria as the employees of a company.
The user profile page
To rate, and to prevent fake reviews, we invite you to identify yourself on our platform. If you sign up with Google or LinkedIn, your name may appear in your account as your username. Your username is visible to other users. If this is a problem, you can change it in your user account by clicking at the top right of the menu and then on the relevant tab.
Naturally, your login details are visible only to you.
On your profile page, you can read all of your comments.
When a user or a company representative wants to reply to one of your comments, you will be notified.
What others can see of your profile
Others can see your username, the total number of reviews you have left and the profile under which they were left. However, they can only read your last 5 published comments in detail.
They can see your user level, which corresponds to the small icon next to your username.
A site that lists every CSR effort, thanks to partners
There are hundreds of French and European labels, and it is impossible to tell the genuine from the fake. On our site, we want to display not only stakeholder ratings but also the results of other CSR impact assessment sites, for greater transparency.
So on each company page, we try to include as much information as possible about the company’s activities and its awards and efforts in terms of sustainable development.
Rate A Company – the stakeholder CSR audit specialist
For companies that want to go further in this CSR assessment with their stakeholders, we offer 3 packages:
- A free, freemium offer for companies that consider they have already reached a good level of CSR maturity and are not afraid of being assessed by their professional ecosystem
- A Semi-autonomous CSR offer, which provides an audit on neutral ground, publishes the audit results automatically on the platform when the overall rating is good, and alerts you before anyone else for a year whenever a new comment is published on the platform
- A Committed CSR Approach + offer, for companies that want end-to-end support in this transition and want to engage their stakeholders in continuous improvement.
The methodology behind our audits
CSR articles to make CSR accessible to all
We publish articles regularly to explain CSR concepts and present the conclusions of some of the CSR assignments we have just carried out with companies.
The idea is to encourage transparency and give ideas to companies looking for inspiration.
The first YouTube channel on CSR
Our aim is to make CSR easy, fun and accessible to all. More and more schools train managers and engineers in CSR, but because of its Anglo-Saxon cultural roots and its evolving nature, it has so far been given very little popular coverage in the media and in textbooks.
As a result, our videos have become a must for teachers and professionals who need to explain the concepts. In 90 % of cases we are happy to make this content available free of charge, but as with any work created by a third party, we ask you to send us a request beforehand.
We are also happy to answer your questions about CSR. Please ask them in the comments section under our YouTube videos or on our LinkedIn page.
We are always delighted to receive suggestions for video topics, and to take all your feedback on board so that we can improve.
Contact page
It is mainly intended for requesting quotes or setting up partnerships. For any questions about CSR as a topic, please get in touch with us on social media.
