Think Tank The Conference Board announced today that it is launching the ESG Advantage Benchmarking Platform, Powered by ESGAUGE. The new tool is aimed to enable US public companies to benchmark themselves relative to their peers on a number of ESG-linked metrics.

ESGAUGE is a data mining and analytics firm, focused on disclosure of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices. The firm’s solutions are designed for corporate practitioners and professional services firm seeking customized information on U.S. public companies.

As investors and consumers become increasingly aware of sustainability issues, demanding improved performance from the companies they interact with and invest in, companies are coming under increasing pressure to stay ahead of the curve on ESG issues. The Conference Board’s new platform is intended to address these companies’ unmet needs for reliable, relevant and timely data, enabling them to know where they stand relative to their peers in their practices and progress.

The ESG Advantage Benchmarking Platform will allow subscriber companies to benchmark themselves in five areas: executive compensation, director compensation, board practices, CEO succession, and shareholder voting.  Subscribers can specify groups of peer companies to track, then expand this circle of competitive intelligence to peers of peers, reverse peers, and beyond, with coverage including the entire Russell 3000 universe.

Matteo Tonello, Managing Director of ESG Research at The Conference Board said:

“Governance leaders have long relied on The Conference Board’s benchmarking research on corporate governance and compensation practices to make sense of where they stand in a fast-changing landscape. The ESG Advantage Benchmarking Platform, Powered by ESGAUGE, brings these resources to the next level. Subscribing companies are able to visualize online emerging trends in real-time and, in a few clicks, zero in on highly granular competitive analysis down to the level of individual directors, proxy votes, and CEO succession events.”

The platform utilizes real-time databases, using ESGAUGE’s AI and data-mining solutions to compile information from thousands of disclosures from Russell 3000 companies.

Paul Hodgson, Senior Adviser at ESGAUGE said:

“ESGAUGE is honored to be the data source behind The Conference Board’s ESG Advantage Benchmarking Platform. We are rightly proud of the depth and quality of our data, on everything from hard-to-locate governance practices to CEO pay, and it is a confirmation of that to have been chosen to power TCB’s newest product. We look forward to rolling out the various data sets and finding interesting things to say about it all.”

The new platform will be launched in stages. The online benchmarking tools covering executive compensation and director compensation is available now, and will be followed by tools for board practices, shareholder voting, and CEO succession in the coming months, in time for companies to prepare for the 2021 proxy season.

Paul Washington, Executive Director of The Conference Board ESG Center said:

“The ESG Advantage Benchmarking Platform is one way we are transforming our offerings to better serve our members and society. We’re focused on providing even more timely and relevant research and programs to help companies lead the way in a new era of corporate governance, sustainability, and philanthropy. The ESG Advantage Benchmarking Platform puts additional tools in the hands of companies to help them stay ahead of the curve in governance and compensation, and in the coming months we’re going to introduce other ESG Advantage online tools to help companies benchmark themselves in sustainability and corporate philanthropy.”

The Conference Board stated that it will continue to release a series of accompanying reports and data dashboards that are free to access for journalists, analysts, and the interested public at large. Updated in real-time, the dashboards will enable users to drill down on hundreds of real-time data points on executive compensation, director compensation, board practices, CEO succession, and shareholder voting. They can then further segment this data by index, sector, and company size, and export dynamically generated charts and tables.