Bigmouth in Action: Social Stewardship
If you know Bigmouth, you know that we’re big on social stewardship: Working toward our collective goals while also considering our impact on people and the planet. It’s built into the way we do business, the way we seek out collaborators and even our agency’s mission.
Talking about social stewardship could be taken as virtue signaling (akin to Pinkwashing during Pride month). And it is virtue signaling without action and passion to back it up.
The sad truth is that even virtue signaling makes a difference in our current socio-political climate. People who don’t fit a very specific mold face an ever-uncertain future, as do the planet and the very fabric of our society. Bigots and despots are signaling their values in both word and action, and those in opposition must communicate our values in any way we can.
The Bigmouth mission:
Create a culture of respect and inclusion; work with brands that share our values; and make a difference to communities that could use our support.
Stepping beyond virtue signaling
If your organization really, truly values social stewardship, it’s time to step beyond virtue signaling. But what does that look like?
Projecting social stewardship in vague terms reveals the tip of a company’s iceberg — the shiny portion glistening in the sun. Virtue-signaling companies are content to keep it that way, putting the onus of research and critical thinking on clients, customers and collaborators.
We’d like to show you the rest of our iceberg.
This chunk of the iceberg is closest to the surface and quickly becomes evident if you’re a Bigmouth client, partner or fan of our social accounts. And we’re always working to think up new ways to both share our social stewardship and offer context for our decisions.
In 2024, we collaborated on our first-ever impact report, a physical documentation of our social and environmental impacts as corporate citizens. The report both celebrates our accomplishments in these arenas, and creates an accountability blueprint for the years to come.
And in 2025, we achieved B Corporation certification. This objective, third-party assessment verifies that Bigmouth meets verified high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability. B Corp certification was a pie-in-the-sky goal when our founder, Jonathan Hart, created Bigmouth. Achieving this years-long goal is both a huge honor and a challenge to continuously uphold our values. Here are a few of the ways we live our social stewardship externally.
- Collaborating with clients and partners who share our values and commitment to DEI
- Respecting the environment, those who came before us, and the people and communities we interact with
- Giving back between the margins of our business, including charitable donations and direct community work
- Carefully choosing who we work with and how we work together
- Working as good corporate citizens by enacting change for our clients
- Remaining aware of intersectionality in all scenarios
- Creating a statement covering our environmental stewardship policies to communicate to partners and clients
- Sharing our expectations and policies with clients, both as a means of setting expectations and helping us all do better
This portion of the Bigmouth iceberg is almost never visible (unless you strap on some scuba gear or get into a detailed conversation with one of our team members). It’s also the most important portion: Our team can’t show up and elevate the rest of the iceberg without a strong base.
In 2024, we collaborated on our first-ever employee handbook, which details both traditional HR information and our values-based environmental practices, pro bono policy and social stewardship goals. Documenting this information holds everyone accountable to our values as an organization and to one another as people.
Here are a few of the ways we live our social stewardship internally.
- Recognizing and valuing all backgrounds, voices, roles and contributions
- Educating ourselves to combat ignorance and build understanding
- Viewing our work through a lens of equity and inclusion, including visuals, vocabulary and accessibility
- Mandating transparency and honesty in our business practices
- Supporting mental health and personal balance
- Nurturing vulnerability to lift up those around us
- Creating recommendations for home office water and recycling use, and tracking our data
- Creating guidelines and approved suppliers for home office goods like paper, ink, pens and more
- Researching and developing recommendations for reducing our electricity use
- Creating an AI policy that considers its environmental impacts
- Capturing our agency’s estimated electricity use in kWh for benchmarking
We want to do more in 2025
In our first-ever Bigmouth Impact Report, published earlier this year, our team members shared the ways we want to grow as social stewards in the coming year. We’re still working on the how behind the what of these goals, but we promise to be good social stewards by showing up in both word and actions.
