LONDON — BoldT has launched a new product to bring rapid analysis of clients’ reputational risk, purpose and communications together into one platform.

The service, Riskr, has been developed in partnership with sustainable investment specialists Mettle Capital to “enable corporate leadership and communicators to adopt a common framework and language around reputation risk for the first time,” according to the agency.

Riskr automates the cross-indexing of data from media, social media, investor reports and other sources against environmental, societal and governance (ESG) factors, as well as the standards outlined by the Sustainability Standards Accounting Board (SASB).

BoldT’s new London leadership team, Steve Earl and Jon Rhodes, are behind the development. Earl said the new platform “cracks the code” for the communications industry’s efforts to “put proof behind what it does to promote and protect reputation.”

Earl (pictured, left) said: “Boards often have plenty of data about risk, but can’t always tell what it means to their reputation, or whether corporate communications is actually benefitting their reputation. On the agency side, I’ve always wished that evaluation wasn’t the last slide in the deck, and we realised the rise of ESG investing was a way to bring together purpose, reputation and comms performance. Rather than having to manually cross-index across different sets of data, Riskr crunches it automatically to give a definitive view of the ESG elements that really matter to your reputation.”

The platform enables users to consolidate multiple existing reporting and data feeds covering reputation and risk. It can be applied to situations such as: providing boards with data to supporting business strategy and decision-making; reputation reports across markets and business units; identifying emerging trends and issues that can be deprioritised; competitor and industry analysis across brand, corporate and purpose-led communications; and assessing the reputational impact of corporate communications, including during the Covid-19 crisis.

Rhodes (pictured, right) said: “We want to eliminate the irony that reputation is most tangible in a crisis. Riskr gives a clear and actionable view of reputation that creates a consistent framework and language for monitoring, evaluation and most importantly decision-making, right to the top of an organisation.”

He said BoldT was already building bespoke Riskr dashboards for clients that can also factor in other sources such as employee surveys and Glassdoor reviews, to help “red flag” issues around employee engagement and satisfaction.

Mettle Capital co-founder Rufus Grantham added: “Our work to track the daily sentiment and discussion about companies versus what have become standard ESG, trust and reputation factors for investors gives a powerful basis for analysing reputation risk and its impact. This is something that our current users, including asset managers and hedge funds, really value. Linking up with BoldT enables us to bring the rigour of the investment world to anyone with a stake in business reputation.”