A Growing Impact – Verdical Group’s Journey to Illustrate Corporate Good

By Kelly Ryan

Since Verdical Group’s inception in 2012, our company has been a leading provider of LEED certification services. LEED is a green building rating system that certifies the highest performing buildings in the built environment. At Verdical Group, it’s our job to enhance the environmental performance of every project we touch. Our team is passionate about the great outdoors, so we love making a positive environmental impact on our projects. VG buildings use less energy, less water, and create less waste than conventional buildings, and we get to feel good about our contributions to the world every day.

We wanted to find out exactly how much of an impact we’ve had since the beginning, so we began a rigorous process to compile our project data to share in an infographic highlighting our Verdical impact. When we were done and took a minute to sit with the numbers and think about our impact on the world, we were floored by the results.

The “Verdical Impact” infographic project began with a VG team brainstorming session. We answered questions regarding specific metrics to track, data organization, and how this data would be translated and represented on the infographic. We also looked at where this data would be retrieved from and the units it would be calculated in. In the end, the team settled on four metrics to represent VG’s positive impact: energy, water, waste, and people educated.

Following our kickoff meeting, a large Excel spreadsheet of data points began to take shape. We created separate tabs for each of our impact metrics, and were meticulous in our data collection to ensure accuracy. Data for the energy, water, and waste metrics were retrieved from VG’s LEED Online project database. For data on the number of people we’ve educated, we used another Excel sheet to track team presentations and the number of attendees.

Our commitment to become a 1% for the Planet member company is another significant measure of corporate good for our company. We give one percent of our gross annual revenue (not just profit) to environmental nonprofit organizations through the 1% for the Planet program. Nonprofits we’ve supported include: USGBC-LA, Living Building Challenge LA Collaborative, AIA|LA, ANEW Foundation, LA 2030 District, and the 1% for the Planet organization.

As a company that exists to create positive environmental impact, the 1% program provides us with a reputable third party platform to verify our commitment to “walk the talk.”

The benefits of being a 1% for the Planet Member Company are two-fold; the environment benefits through the work completed by our nonprofit partners, and we benefit from clients who choose to work with us because of our company values and visible commitment to corporate good. It’s an unbeatable win-win.

We’ll continue to track our impact moving forward and we hope our work to illustrate corporate good will inspire other companies to do the same. Let’s all “go verdical” together.