AMSTERDAM — April 22, 2021 — A year after becoming a certified B Corporation, WeTransfer is publishing its first Responsible Business Report, evaluating its impact and outlining its future ambitions across the five B Corp assessment areas: community, customers, the environment, governance and workers.
Titled From A to B Corp (and beyond): Our road to responsibility, the report looks back at the company’s journey, and sets out how it will build on the progress it has made. It also reports on its efforts made in embedding responsible business into decision-making across the organization.
The report, published online today, can be downloaded here: https://we.tl/responsibility
Achieving B Corp status was a significant milestone for WeTransfer, becoming one of the first global technology companies to receive the certification. The company also officially became climate neutral earlier this year.
Businesses - both B Corp and non-B Corp - use a range of frameworks and impact assessment tools on environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting. The Responsible Business report will add an additional layer of transparency to WeTransfer’s existing reporting through B Lab and will become an annual fixture.
Using B Corp’s five impact areas has guided WeTransfer to challenge itself to be ambitious in its aims, explicit in its goals and deliberate in its actions. Through this report, From A to B Corp (and beyond): Our road to responsibility, WeTransfer wants to inspire other tech firms and share learnings to encourage others to adopt a similar approach and lead the sector.
The report includes case studies detailing WeTransfer’s partnership activities and highlights the impact of WePresent, WeTransfer’s editorial platform, in the creative community.
This includes:
- Work with the Union of Concerned Photographers, a collective documenting and responding to the harmful effects of human activity on ecosystems.
- Use of its platforms to help fundraise and draw attention to the Robogee project - a robot mascot created by a team of Syrian refugee children to tell their stories and document their lives.
- Collaboration highlights and impact— 80% of featured artists on WePresent, WeTransfer’s editorial platform, said the additional exposure increased or significantly increased traffic to their own website.
Commenting, WeTransfer Chief Executive Gordon Willoughby said: “At WeTransfer we’ve always done things a little differently. Balancing people, planet and profit has been part of the WeTransfer story from day one, and today’s report is another important step in that journey.
“By sharing our progress and learnings as a company we hope to encourage dialogue and discussion and lead positive change within the technology sector, the creative industries and beyond.
“Following the significant milestone of our certification as a climate neutral company earlier this year, the ambition set out in this report will enable us to continue putting responsible business at the heart of our approach as we grow.”
WeTransfer Chair Martha Lane Fox said: “This report underlines how successfully WeTransfer has combined a fantastic suite of products with strong company values, embedding these across the firm and everything it does. I’m lucky enough to have worked in the industry for more than two decades and built my own company so I know what it takes to genuinely champion responsible and sustainable growth.
“Being a responsible business is fundamental to WeTransfer and its success in the future. It is something we take very seriously at board level and we are pushing ourselves to do more. In my opinion, this will be the difference between success and failure for companies in the future.”
About WeTransfer
Having made its name in the game of quick and simple file-sharing, WeTransfer has grown into an end-to-end suite of digital solutions with more than 70 million monthly active users in 190 countries. WeTransfer’s set of tools are specifically designed to enable creative professionals to inspire, conceive, share, and deliver their work. Collect is the go-to app people turn to for saving and sharing inspiration. Paste® is the collaborative presentation tool of choice for fast-moving teams. Paper® helps creative minds sketch, paint, and draw on iOS. And of course there’s the original file-sharing platform. The company celebrates and inspires its global creative community on WePresent, WeTransfer’s editorial platform to 4m monthly readers.
As a certified B Corporation WeTransfer strives to use business as a force for good. Since the beginning WeTransfer has donated up to 30% of advertising real estate to raise awareness for artists, creative work, and the world’s most pressing issues such as climate change and gun control. This amounts to more than $300 million to date and has led to partnerships with artists and organizations like Marina Abramovic, Björk, FKA twigs, Ryan McGinley, Solange Knowles, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and the UN Development Program.