Impact Calculator

Ethos offers an Impact Calculator for mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), separately managed accounts (SMAs), portfolios, and other investment products.

Through the program, Ethos provides data and setup (integration) to create the calculator for your products and enable prospects and clients to assess the impact of investing in your products.

Prospects and clients enter a dollar amount in the calculator and immediately see their potential impact if they were to invest that money in your products.

The calculator can include up to 23 optional metrics for investors to understand their impact, such as Cars removed from the road, Tuna fish saved, Minorities hired, Months of rent paid, and more.

The calculator can be included on your website or anywhere you choose. Ethos provides several options for setup, including an embeddable widget or working with your development account to integrate the calculator seamlessly into your website.

Ethos updates the underlying data weekly (minor updates) and monthly (fuller updates) and provides a summary if the updates will affect the underlying impact calculation.

More information is included below on the program and how Ethos calculates the underlying metrics.

The following metrics are currently available as options to include in the calculator. Please reach out to our account at support@ethosesg.com if you would like to request additional metrics.

Data collection

Each of the available metrics for the Impact Calculator is based on an underlying data source, such as company filings, government agency data, or non-governmental organizations.

In total Ethos aggregates more than 2.2 million data points from 260+ sources. Aggregation includes a mix of APIs, manual collection, excel data feeds and scraping.

We monitor for updated data and use the data to score companies and funds on each metric whenever there is updated data.

For example, we check if there is updated data on environmental fines from Violation Tracker, or data on climate-related shareholder actions from As You Sow.

When there is no data available for a company, we use the average of the company's sub-industry (determined through publicly-available industry classification systems and company self-reported peers).

Ethos customers can find all the sources we use for each cause on cause profile pages.

You can find more information on our general data collection and ratings methodology here.

Impact metrics (real-world metrics) calculation

For each metric available for the Impact Calculator, Ethos calculates impact using data for fund or portfolio holdings compared to a benchmark of your choosing.

For example, here’s how we calculate cars added to or removed from the road by a fund or portfolio:

• Calculate fund or portfolio weighted-average data: calculate the weighted-average GHG/CO2 equivalent Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions of the fund or portfolio, net of emissions offset by company products (such as renewable energy sources). Ethos uses company self-reported emissions data, third-party emissions data, and statistical analysis to assess company emissions. More information is available here.
• Calculate benchmark weighted-average data: calculate the same data for a selected benchmark fund or portfolio. You can select the appropriate benchmark you would like to compare your product to.
• Calculate percentage difference (efficiency): calculate the percentage difference between your fund/portfolio and the benchmark. For example, if a portfolio had a weighted-average of 6.4M metric tons Carbon Footprint and the benchmark had a weighted-average of 27.1M metric tons Carbon Footprint, the portfolio would be ~76% better (more carbon efficient) than the benchmark.
• Calculate real-world equivalent cost: calculate the approximate number of cars the portfolio or fund value is equal to, using the average annual cost of owning a car in the US (data from AAA). For example, if the average annual cost of owning a car in the US is $10,000 and the portfolio dollar value is $100,000, the portfolio would be equal to approximately 10 cars.
• Calculate cars removed from or added to the road: multiply the number of cars the portfolio or fund is equal to by the efficiency percentage (#3 above) to calculate the approximate equivalent number of cars removed from or added to the road.

Other real-world metrics on Ethos are calculated with a similar methodology.