From Chad Hunter, Aspiration's Head of Sustainability
Hello Aspiration customers!
Today, I wanted to discuss why we are replacing the Conscience Coalition with the Green Marketplace and how that will allow us to scale the program to ultimately provide you with more opportunities to have an impact, and be rewarded for those actions.
Evolving Our Approach to Values-Based Rewards Program
We launched the Conscience Coalition with a great goal in mind: to help you easily identify and support businesses that share your passion for positive social and environmental impact. While the intention was admirable, we encountered some hurdles that made it difficult to deliver the experience we envisioned.
Here's what we learned:
Data Challenges: The landscape of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting is still evolving. Many companies lack comprehensive data in these areas, making it difficult to fairly and transparently assess their impact across the board.
Focus and Fairness: By casting such a wide net with the Conscience Coalition, it became hard to find a single, clear standard to determine which companies should be included. Many businesses excel in one or two impact areas, but not necessarily in all. This made it tough to make fair and consistent decisions.
A More Focused Approach to Empower Your Climate Impact
Our commitment to helping you find and support values-aligned businesses remains strong. We're just refining how we achieve that goal.
We're shifting our focus to a more targeted approach on climate-friendly brands that we believe will deliver a more meaningful and actionable experience for you.
We've chosen to zero in on climate impact for a few key reasons:
Urgency: The climate crisis demands immediate action, and we believe focusing our efforts here will have the greatest positive impact.
Clarity: Assessing a company's climate impact often involves clearer, more measurable data than broader ESG factors. This allows us to be more transparent about our choices and give you greater confidence in the brands we feature.
Expanded Options: Focusing on climate opens the door to a wider range of businesses that are taking meaningful steps toward sustainability, giving you more choices when you shop.
Greater Impact: By concentrating our resources on climate action, we can help you make a more significant difference with your everyday purchases.
Building a Thriving Green Marketplace
Our new Green Marketplace will feature a curated network of brands that are actively working to reduce their carbon footprint, promote renewable energy, and adopt climate-friendly practices.
We'll provide clear explanations for why each brand is included so that you have all the information you need to make informed choices.
You can find more information on the Green Marketplace and brand qualification process here.
Evolving Our Cash Back Model to Expand Our Impact
To create a Green Marketplace that truly accelerates climate action, we're transitioning to a new partnership model that allows us to work with a much wider range of climate-friendly brands. This expansion means more opportunities for you to support climate-friendly brands and earn rewards for your green choices.
With this shift comes an adjustment to our cash back tiers. While the rates are slightly lower than before (3% cash back for standard customers, and 6% cash back for Aspiration Plus customers³), this change enables us to include significantly more brands in the program; well more than double at launch, with more to come in the weeks and months ahead.
Here's why this change matters:
More Choice: You'll have a far wider selection of climate-friendly brands to shop from, giving you more ways to align your spending with your values.
Increased Impact: By supporting more climate-friendly companies, you're amplifying your positive impact on the climate and earning more rewards in the process.
Collective Action: With more participants in the Green Marketplace, we can collectively drive greater change towards a sustainable future.
We understand that any change in rewards can raise questions. We firmly believe that this new approach will ultimately deliver more value and make your participation in the Green Marketplace even more meaningful.
Join Us in Creating a Thriving Green Marketplace
Your feedback is invaluable to us as we build the Green Marketplace. We're committed to continuous improvement, and your feedback will play a crucial role in that process.
If you have suggestions for brands you'd like to see included, or any other feedback about the Green Marketplace, we encourage you to share them with us.
Request new brands to be evaluated directly here.