Last month, we announced that we’re changing the name of our flagship research product. Say hello to the Big Tech Scorecard! And save the date for the launch on April 27.
But that’s not the only change afoot. Over the last year, we’ve been hard at work piloting new ways of deepening our impact by making our data and insights easier to access and use by our diverse range of stakeholders. This includes policymakers, investors, and digital rights advocates around the world.
Today, we’re unwrapping a little gift to ourselves by giving that work a bold new brand and a new digital home. We are thrilled to share them with you.
Reflecting the range of RDR’s work: data-driven, dynamic, bold
Our colorful new brand, designed by In-House International, is vibrant, dynamic, and bold. (Just like we are.) The upward arrows reflect our drive to hold companies accountable and help them improve, while the circle gives a nod to the data points that we collect and draw on in our work. They also underscore the new tagline encapsulating our mission: Advancing corporate accountability for human rights in the digital age.
We’ve designed our new website, meanwhile, to be more attractive and user-friendly as well as better organized to reflect our expanding range of activities in addition to highlighting our core products, the RDR Index and the forthcoming Big Tech and Telco Giants scorecards.
Three new areas of growth
Three new sections, in particular, deserve mention because they represent areas of growth for RDR: Policy Engagement, Investor Guidance, and Get Involved.
Our Policy Engagement section gives us an opportunity to show how we inform policy development. It gathers our enterprise reports, hearing testimony and comments, and statements we’ve signed onto in one place.
Likewise, Investor Guidance highlights our collaboration with institutional investors to push the companies we evaluate to recognize shortcomings in their policies and practices that could lead to material risks. We will also track digital rights-related shareholder resolutions here, including ones that have cited RDR’s research.
Get Involved is a call to digital rights organizations around the world to build on our methods to conduct their own research. It features corporate accountability research and campaigns from partners in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere. This page will also host our new Research Lab, a new trove of resources intended to help guide others to conduct corporate accountability research of their own. We will also make our extensive material in other languages available here.
Other new features we’re excited about include the ability to feature wins and multimedia more prominently, as well as offer multiple opportunities to subscribe to our monthly newsletter the Radar and to donate to support our work. (Remember, we do not take any money from the companies we rank or may rank in the future, or their competitors.)
We’ll be making improvements and adding new features and other elements as we go, so let us know if there’s anything you’d really like to see.
Looking good while looking ahead
Nine years ago, when we first launched RDR, our objective was to push the world’s biggest tech and telecom companies to embed human rights protections for freedom of expression and privacy at every level of their policies and practices. We have made good on that commitment, becoming widely recognized as the gold standard for assessing Big Tech and the Telco Giants on their respect for users’ freedom of expression and privacy rights.
Along the way, many of our funders and allies have pushed us to build on our rankings with more policy analysis and recommendations, collaboration with like-minded partners, and a stronger communications game. In other words, they encouraged us to focus on becoming more visible to amplify our impact. Our new logo and website, as well as our expanded scope of work, are a public answer to that call.
We can’t wait to share more of our work using these new tech and design resources. So follow the arrows, take a look around, and let us know what you think!
