Becoming a B Corp: our journey through certification.

As we complete a little over a month of becoming B Corp certified, we look back at the process of joining the “B” movement. Standing for Benefit for all — workers, communities, customers, and our planet — being a B Corporation is all about reimagining our economic system to create a positive impact for everyone.

With B Lab introducing new certification standards that raise the bar even higher, we want to share what we've learned, both for those considering becoming a B Corp and for fellow certified companies navigating these changes alongside us.

Know your why.

The certification path is a long, arduous one. At times, it makes you question if it's worth it. But it is! Not for the certificate itself, but for the transformation it brings to your business. Knowing your why will be your north star during those challenging periods along the way.

It took us two years to certify as a B Corp, and trust us: we didn’t wake up one day and decide to certify. It all started when, back in 2023, we were faced with the need to scale our team. As we grew, we didn’t want the essence that makes us Significa to dissipate — and designing a rebrand or drafting a new manifesto just wouldn’t cut it.

To keep things moving forward with integrity, deeper work was needed. This meant looking closely at our operations, our team experience, our decision-making — getting real about what needed to change, which habits needed letting go of, which conversations we had to hold space for. The certification process pushed us to examine practices we’d had for years, questioning assumptions we had never challenged, and implementing new systems that often felt uncomfortable at first.

When we took the B Impact Assessment (BIA) for the first time, our score was 50.6, which is just around the average score for businesses starting their certification journey. This was a clear sign that we had plenty of work to do. But instead of rushing to the finish line, we decided to address it like any of our (client-facing) projects: built with intention, properly structured to foster collaboration, iteration and alignment.

Going through this process gave us a framework which helped us navigate the challenge of scaling from a small team into an agency with global reach, ensuring we remain aligned to our core values of empathy and compassion, teamwork, integrity, playfulness, and ambition in every aspect of our operations — from governance and finance to client relationships and day-to-day workflows.

Embrace resistance.

We started with Governance. It’s not the flashiest area, but it’s the one that sets the tone for everything else. It meant involving our leadership early, clarifying our responsibilities, and making sure the commitment started at the top.

There were, of course, moments of resistance — not because anyone disagreed with the values or reasoning behind the necessary changes, but because change itself requires adaptation. Our office-first environment, where we spend most of our days collaborating in the same physical space, made these transitions both easier and harder. Easier because we could have immediate conversations about challenges, harder because every change was immediately felt throughout our team.

Collaborative, all the way.

The B Impact Assessment (BIA) isn’t something one person or department can do alone. Involving all stakeholders in the process gains buy-in and drives the project forward, so we had board members, HR & finance, legal and marketing support every step of the way.

Plus, we reached out to other B Corps — some of which could even be considered our competitors — and were met with generosity, honesty, and support. That's the beauty of the B Corp community, as it thrives on shared knowledge and collaboration.

This was particularly important considering our context in Portugal, where the B Corp community is still relatively small, but growing. Being one of the few certified digital product agencies in the country meant we had to adapt global best practices to our local context. It also meant that achieving certification carried additional significance, as we weren't just joining a global movement; we were helping build momentum for responsible business within our community.

If you're on this path, don't wait around to start building those relationships, especially within your local ecosystem where your impact and example can resonate more strongly.

The shifting landscape: embracing B Corp's new standards.

The B Corp movement is evolving rapidly, and for good reasons. B Lab's new standards represent the most significant shift since the movement began, raising the bar for what it means to be a responsible, ethical business in today's world.

What's changing.

The new standards will play a fundamental role in re-shaping how businesses demonstrate their impact. Instead of accumulating points across five broad categories, companies must now show meaningful action in seven specific, high-priority areas that focus on climate action, going beyond basic compliance, worker empowerment that extends beyond traditional benefits, stakeholder governance that embeds purpose into decision-making and transparency in reporting and accountability measures. Where previously a company could build up points in one impact area, and fall behind on others, this new system will require compliance across the board to become or remain eligible for certification.

For us, these changes present both challenges and opportunities. We've built our reputation on building digital experiences that matter – now we need to apply that same intentional strategic thinking into building an impactful, future-proof operational strategy.

The 7 new impact areas of B Corp Certification.

As B Lab moves away from a points-based system, companies must now meet specific standards across seven key areas.

Purpose & Stakeholder Governance: embed purpose into your business model and ensure decisions consider the interests of all stakeholders, not just shareholders.

Fair Work: provide quality jobs with fair wages, positive working conditions, and systems that involve employees in decision-making.

Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion: actively foster inclusive, diverse, and equitable workplaces — and support the same in the communities you operate in.

Human Rights: identify, prevent, and mitigate any risks of negative impact on people across your operations and supply chain.

Climate Action: take measurable steps to reduce your environmental impact, including setting science-based targets to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

Environmental Stewardship & Circularity: use resources responsibly and shift toward circular practices — reducing waste and environmental harm across your operations and partners.

Collective Action & Government Affairs: engage in collective efforts for systemic change, support policies that prioritise people and the planet, and — for larger companies — embrace tax transparency.

Our approach to the new standards.

We're embracing these changes with the same mindset that guided our initial certification journey. We have always been conscious that certification would only be the beginning of this path for us, but with recertification to come, it was only ever the first milestone on the road. We deeply believe in continuous improvement, and these new standards will enable us to continue to further benefit all who encounter Significa and can enable us to build a more resilient, purpose-driven company.

The real challenge lies ahead.

Meeting these new standards won't be simple. Some aspects of it will align naturally with our work, like using our design expertise to create accessible user-centred digital experiences. Others will challenge us, like finding innovative ways to further reduce our environmental footprint within our supply chain, or balancing client work with impactful initiatives when resources are limited, or measuring the social impact of the products we build beyond user satisfaction. In an operational sense, extending our influence of good practices throughout our supply chain and client relationships will also continue to demand a certain degree of persistence from us.

These aren't pre-empted excuses, they're the realities we're actively looking to address. And we believe that by naming these challenges openly, we can find more creative solutions.

What this means for Significa.

Perhaps most importantly, these changes are pushing us to more clearly articulate our unique position as impact builders. As designers and developers, each team member at Significa influences how people interact with technology every day — we know those interactions have profound ripple effects. That’s a responsibility we should take seriously and embrace.

But crucially, it goes beyond pixels and code. How we work is central to our B Corp status. We need to continuously ask ourselves how we can design experiences that encourage positive impact. How can we build products that foster connection rather than division? How can we ensure the digital world we're helping to create is one we want to live in?

With Portugal’s growing community of impact-driven organisations and B Corps, we recognise our responsibility to help shape the conversation, not just about what responsible digital design looks like, but how it’s practised through the way we operate as a business. Essentially, it’s not what we say, but what we do, and how we do it. By sharing our journey transparently — both the successes and the struggles — we hope to make the path a little clearer for those who follow.

The journey continues!

The process of becoming a B Corp has changed Significa. It has helped us grow with intention, deepen our purpose, and involve our team to work towards a shared roadmap for continuous improvement.

As the standards evolve, so will we. We're committed to the ongoing work of aligning our practices with our purpose, not because it's easy, but because it makes us better at what we do.

We're proud to be a B Corp. And even prouder of the work it took — and continues to take — to live up to it. As we navigate these new standards, we'd love to hear from others on similar journeys. After all, that's what this community is all about — growing better, together.