If you’re considering getting your BCorp certification, here are some tips from Amelia, who heads up our Special Projects Office (ok, she is the SPO) and as our nominated 'B-Keeper' was responsible for managing the process for us.

1. Designate one person to gather the information necessary and complete the assessment. This saves time and avoids doubling up and confusion.
2. As a start-up we didn’t have many formal policies or procedures in place before we began the process, so the BCorp framework along with the templates BCorp provided were great tools to organise and structure our internal business policies.
3. Attend a BCorp workshop in your area. The BCorp team are pros and will help you classify your business in the correct industry sector as well as help you unlock different areas to access hidden points of the assessment you might not have known were available.

Don’t be daunted by the process, once you develop a systematic approach to answering the questions it’s easy to start ticking off tasks.

Once you get going;

• Use the Bookmark function beside each question to mark the ones you need to revisit and/or improve on.

• Using the Reports function at the side of the assessment you can filter the questions to only view these marked questions. This saves you from continually wading through questions you have already addressed.

• Or set yourself Goals with email reminders using the star!

• Use the Learn feature on each question to better understand exactly what is being ask of you.

• The "Knowledge Base” in the very bottom of the assessment is a great resource – it has stacks of FAQs, guides, templates and definitions.

• In each question there’s a Comments section and it helped us immensely in the Verification stage when we had included notes there about why or how we met the question requirements when completing the application.

Note: There are no short cuts to becoming a BCorp, the process is the process and it's really important to commit fully to it, but there are a few things you can do to make it a bit easier!