This announcement has been several months in the making, but we feel we have finally nailed down the rating methodology for our other ratings outside of political contributions. This methodology has been passed around internally and has been informally approved by our board of directors. I'm publishing it here for everyone to take a look at and if you like comment on. You can read about it here - Buy
Blue Non-Political Ratings Methodology.
These new ratings will not be available until we release our new website in the June/July timeframe. However, if you'd like to start bookmarking articles in the meantime and digging things up on the internet please feel free to do so. However, please don't email them to us as they stand a good chance of getting lost.
We have decided upon 5 categories which will be rated and they are related to numerous sub categories which will not be explicitly rated. Those categories are: Corporate and Social Responsibility, Employment Equality, Environment, Industry Practices, Labor & Human Rights.
The other major news item I wanted to talk about is socially responsible investing. We have started discussions with a socially responsible investing firm here in the bay area that will allow you to use all of the ratings on our site (including these new ratings) as screens for your investments. The timeline for this is mid to late summer, coinciding with the release of our new website.
We are looking to host a fundraiser dinner in San Francisco to kick this off and start introducing people to the idea sometime in June. Right now we are looking for an anchor speaker for the event. We currently have a couple of emails out to various people, but if anyone knows an anchor quality person that might be interested in speaking or a restaurant in San Francisco that might be interested in hosting 50+ people please shoot us an email at mail@buyblue.org.
However, we do have a few "swing for the fences" candidates in mind. Now we aren't by any means setting our expectations here, but hey if you don't dream big things then you can't achieve big things. If anyone happens to have contact with anyone that has access to or knows Gavin Newsom, we'd definitely like to talk to them. It can be anyone, whoever it is will be better than sending some anonymous email that gets shutdown by the gatekeepers. So if you know anyone email us at mail@buyblue.org.
So that's about it for now, what's on your mind? Also feel free to comment on the rating methodology here.