Ethiscore: Not for the poor

I recently ponied up $30 for a year’s subscription to Ethiscore.org, a British site that aims to help users “quickly and easily identify the best products to support and the worst companies to avoid.”

It’s a neat tool, but it’s far from perfect. There’s no search, for example. (Its sister site, Corporate Critic, which is aimed at institutions rather than individuals, does have search, but it costs nearly $1,800 a year to subscribe.) To access the data in Ethiscore, you scroll through nearly 150 product categories (that’s if you’re a subscriber; otherwise you can only access 15) and select one you’re interested in. That calls up a list of brands, each with a numerical rating on the somewhat nonintuitive scale of 0 to 20 (0 to 4 = very poor, 5 to 9 = poor, 10 to 14 = average, 15 to 20 = good).

The ratings are based on five categories: environment, people, animals, politics, and product sustainability. Much like Alonovo, you can customize how much weight is given to each category based on your preferences. Unlike Alonovo, Ethiscore is not integrated into the shopping experience. It does let you generate shopping lists, though. And it has a cool mail-form feature that lets you email companies and tell them that you like (or don’t like) their practices.

Overall, Ethiscore’s data offering feels a bit limited, both by its selection of product categories and by the number of entries in each category. Only 27 brands are listed under breakfast cereal, for example, many of which I don’t recognize (it doesn’t help, of course, that the site is naturally quite heavily UK-oriented).

Most important, however, is that Ethiscore’s  mission and business model are working at cross-purposes. The information the group provides has the potential to spur real change in the socioeconomic landscape—but only if it’s  easy and convenient for consumers to obtain it and factor it into their everyday buying habits. Charging even a relatively small amount for this data represents a big barrier to a world in which consumers habitually vote with their wallets. But at the same time, it obviously requires considerable time and effort (read: money) to conduct all this research and analysis.

I traded email with one of the researchers at Ethical Consumer Information Systems (the organization behind both Ethiscore and Corporate Critic), asking about this conundrum, and she replied that the organization had always grappled with the problem, and that it was considering becoming a multi-stakeholder cooperative that could bring in “some decent money,” which would enable it to give more information away. “We are also looking into more developments on the internet side of things,” she added. “Watch this space!”