Women Behind The B: Sara Collinge, MD of Don’t Cry Wolf

As part of B Corp Month and International Women’s Day at x+why this March, we’re celebrating the women behind the B. Sara Collinge is the Managing Director of Don’t Cry Wolf. They are a brand activism agency operating in the UK. A ‘gaggle of creatives, artists, singers, vegans, omnivores, eccentrics, introverts, activists, dreamers, thinkers, and positive deviants’, they are unconstrained by conventional wisdom and unafraid to think and act differently to the status quo.

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Tell us a little more about you, and your role at DCW?

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I’m Sara and I’m the MD at Don’t Cry Wolf. My role is many different things – mostly looking after the overall strategic direction of the business, making sure we are looking after our triple bottom line (people and planet alongside profit), measuring our performance against this and hitting our targets responsibly!

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I make sure that we are continually honouring our values and pledges. I’d say that about 50% of my time is spent doing management and strategic communications, about 30% is spent with clients and the remaining 20% is spent on marketing and outreach.

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Don’t Cry Wolf is a brand activism agency, so we focus our work on helping our clients (brands and organisations) to reach their audiences through branding and communications. This is always done with the focus of trying to do good in the world, and being the change that we want to see. We only align with partners that share this vision with us, and who want to achieve positive social, political and environmental goals in all their activities.

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What does it mean to be a B Corp?

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Well starting with what it isn’t - a lot of people talk about it as though it’s an identity. It’s not our identity and it’s not who we are. It’s a proof of point - how we hold ourselves accountable for who we are, what we do, and the citizens that we continually strive to be.

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It’s an accreditation that we do every 3 years, where you’re scored points on various elements of the business - so it ensures that we’re always aiming to measure up to what we’ve promised. It’s also a source of inspiration, community, likeminded people and businesses, and a way to continuously measure feasible standards of best practice.

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What are some of the impacts that B Corp aim to have when it comes to women in the space?

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B Corps are strong when it comes to promoting diversity in general throughout the workplace, especially when it comes to equality in opportunity. Ensuring that we have a very diverse group of people working with us helps us to deliver the best work that we know is possible.

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As part of the B Corp process we look into things like the gender pay gap, how many people work with us from BAME backgrounds and across each level of the company, and other criteria that encourage us to think more expansively and proactively about diversity and opportunity within the company.

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When it comes to marketing and PR, it’s stereotypically a heavily middle-class background, so it’s a big focus of ours to ensure that we find talent that hasn’t necessarily gone through the university system, and to identify more groups from different socio-economic backgrounds.

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How does being a woman in a B Corp compare to your experiences at other companies in the past?

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If I’m honest I’m not sure it’s all that different. If you’re in the market and looking for a role, I can see why the B Corp accreditation is appealing as a woman, as it inherently suggests that company has ethics and values that have considered your needs. It suggests they’re a good business trying to do good things, but it isn’t a stamp of approval from the employment gods, it’s just part and parcel of what’s considered when looking into any company.

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It’s a promising signpost that a business is committed to change, and to improvement, but may not necessarily be there yet. Every company, B Corp or not, continually has a long way to go in seeking to achieve best practices across the board, and improve employee satisfaction and retention.

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So in terms of my personal experiences, I can’t say that it’s felt all that different from other roles. However, what is different is that we are the type of company that heavily values ethics at work - so for example, we won’t work with clients such as oil and gas or big tobacco, no matter how much money they offered!

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Do you think it’s a possibility that all business might be run like B Corps one day and what’s stopping governments from making this mandatory?

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Money, power, politics and influence are all barriers to progress and change. This resistance is embedded in the way society operates. You only have to look at the outcomes of COP last year to see that good intentions are not enough. Powerful big business has a huge opportunity to create a lot of positive change, but they mostly don’t for many complicated reasons - ultimately it boils down to those 4 rough categories. It’s so hard to extricate the challenges the world faces from these things.

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One day I would love to think that more and more companies will become B Corps. Having a universal system that measures companies on things beyond shareholder value would be a powerful force for change. Businesses would be able to make better decisions about who they choose to work with, which would in turn hold others accountable.

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The government may start legislating small components of the space such as the gender pay gap, but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the intense process of full B Corp accreditation. Going through this kind of thing every 3 years would take entire teams at huge multi-nationals, as they’d structurally be much harder to change.

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We’re starting to see many more mainstream brands getting on board as it becomes ‘trendy’, and encouragingly - is driven by consumer preference. It’s still a differentiation factor that demonstrates responsible practices and values, but I’m hopeful about the spread of awareness and what the effects of growing success in the space will be.

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In terms of the past, present and future stages of your B Corp journey - do you have any key insights from each?

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We’re only 4 years old so we’ve been B Corp pending since the start. We had a years worth of training before becoming fully accredited in 2019, a time that we spent feeling very frustrated about not being able to complete our BIA (B Impact Assessment)! However, when we got there, we realised just how much work it was.

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As a new company, we needed to create a lot of stuff for the BIA, so it was a steep learning curve for us. The process is reassuringly rigorous, and it had a more tangible impact on our business than I expected. We also assumed that it would provide a community whereby once you were in, you were in. But as with any space, it takes time to build meaningful connections, and for people to trust our services as a business.

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In that sense, it hasn’t resulted in people just throwing business our way. But we’ve carefully reviewed all our suppliers, and they’re now all B Corp certified. All of these factors helped us to reconsider our impact, and it’s a great source of inspiration about what’s possible. The process has been surprising and unexpected, I initially thought it would feel like a huge achievement - but it just makes you realise how much left there is to do!

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How did you tackle a certain challenge area of the BIA?

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I’ve not been leading the assessment at the moment, as we’ve just started doing it for the second time around, but one difficulty has been the nuance. Some areas are incredibly specific, and you have to make sure that the questions are being interpreted correctly - it takes a lot of time to qualify information just to gain clarity around what you do and don’t already have in place.

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Doing the process a second time around will actually be more challenging I imagine, as we are bigger now and have more processes in place. It’s like doing a new business all over again as everything has changed.

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What are your sources of inspiration and what motivates you?

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I feel motivated every single day, by the drive to continue to improve myself personally and professionally. It’s rewarding to see the business have a positive impact on the world. We know we’re not perfect, but I love seeing it have a deeper, more meaningful impact and reach.

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Every year we pledge 1.5% of our revenue to charity. It’s a sign of our responsible growth to see that pot get bigger and bigger, and it’s been good to feel like we can at least do something small to support Ukraine - for example, donating to the Ukrainian Save The Children Appeal, and tackling some of the disinformation being spread by Russia.

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I want our business to be around for the long-term, we’re not looking to grow rapidly and either sell off or go bankrupt. I want to increase the scope of what we can do, and grow both the team and business measurably and sustainably.

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How has what you do changed you as a person?

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I would say that it’s made me a better person - the process has meant I’ve realised what I don’t know, and how ignorant we can be about so many things. I feel lucky to be given the opportunity to be surrounded by so many incredibly bright and intelligent people on a daily basis. I learn a huge amount from them and we have such a diverse range of consultants.

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It’s humbling to have more of an appreciation for how much there is left to do, and to learn. I have a natural curiosity and I want to learn and discover new things. It’s a reminder that this doesn’t stop as you get older. I now think more deeply about things, and the positive impact that I can have through my actions and motivations.

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