A Private Equity Firm’s Journey with ESGTree to Improve Social Factors and Impact

Since 2020, ESGTree has been working with a $10BN+ Private Equity (PE) firm, based in the United States, to streamline and report on their Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives, with a focus on DE&I and BIPOC best-in-class practices. Key themes across which ESGTree has helped the PE firm are:

Impact management
Diversity, equality, and inclusion
Additionality and intentionality
Minority issues, vulnerable groups, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC)

Impact Management

We helped our client refine their impact goal to have more women in leadership positions. As a result, active steps were taken to increase the representation of women at the board level, in executive management, non-executive management, and among employees. Today, several of our clients’ portfolio companies are led by women CEOs and, in 2021, more than 50% of their new hires were women. Internally, women and individuals from ethnic backgrounds now comprise over 60% of the firm, elucidating the value our team was able to create for the firm.

Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DE&I)

We took a triangular approach to DE&I with this client by using data to monitor various programs for gender, race, and marginalized groups. Our monitoring and reporting framework helped the client manage:

Gender, through various activities including, but not limited to, summer programs for coding for girls in grades 10-12, providing them with the opportunity to learn computer science
Racial minority representation and empowerment through a data-centric approach, focusing on alignment with the Institutional Limited Partners Association (ILPA) Diversity In Action (DIA) initiative and drawing out percentages to create action plans
Marginalized groups by tracking philanthropy and working with non-profit organizations to offer internships for young people coming from historically marginalized communities

Additionality and Intentionality

Our work with this PE firm was also centred around being intentional about the change they wanted to create. Our monitoring framework allowed the PE firm to track intention to develop students from “non-elite” universities as an impactful way to foster social mobility in the country. Today, more than a quarter of their current employees are first-generation college students, and less than 10% of their employees hold an undergraduate or graduate degree from an “elite” educational institution

Minority issues, vulnerable groups, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)

Our ESG framework for this client identified the advancement of social mobility as an important driver for the firm along with efforts to value people from every background. To this end, the firm now provides in-kind and monetary support to non-profit organizations combating social inequalities and injustices and has partnered with a number of organizations focused on reducing social inequality.

ESGTree Reporting Software Features:

Our unique ESG scorecards, benchmarking tool, and carbon calculation software serve a diverse set of private equity firms. Thanks to the Platform Features below, we have been able to position ESG as a value-creation exercise rather than a reporting burden:

Automated data collection with portfolio-level access & aggregation capabilities
Company-specific ESG scorecards to provide value creation for portfolio companies
Simplified greenhouse gas emissions calculator
Multi-level trends analysis and visualizations by indicator, framework, and reporting periods
Client success support from ESG experts
Ready-to-implement framework automation including SASB, IRIS+, TCFD, EDCI, PCAF, SFDR and DEI.
Industry benchmarking against a dataset of 10,000+ companies
Purpose-built to streamline ESG reporting and collaboration for Limited Partners (LPs), General Partners (GPs) and portfolio companies.

Our Clients

We work with a range of financial institutions such as Impact Investors, Private Equity (PE) and Venture Capital (VC), Pension Funds, Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), Banks, Companies & more.

“ESGTree is great at helping to bring management teams on the same page. We view the ESGTree system and team as more of an extension of our company rather than a Software provider.”

Director, Investor Relationships at ICV Partners

“ESGTree streamlines our ESG reporting to our investors. Most notably, the Carbon Calculator feature, which reduces the time taken to calculate carbon emissions by 70%. Kudos to the ESGTree team for providing such a seamless user experience.“

Senior Market Analyst at Emburse

ESGTree provides powerful data solutions to help private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) firms gather, collect, analyze, benchmark and report their ESG data and that of their portfolio companies. Our carbon calculator, customizable and automated ESG frameworks, multi-level report viewing, trends analysis dashboard, and other features aimed to make ESG a value creation tool rather than a reporting burden.

Click here to learn more about our ESGTree’s ESG software solution for Private Equity & Venture Capital.

With ESGTree, save the time and cost of ESG reporting by harnessing the power of the cloud and streamlining ESG data collection, analysis and disclosure.

For more information on the ESGTree’s ESG Reporting Solution, please contact us at :

[email protected]

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