Ethical Guidelines | Good clients, good Projects

As an agency, we have to constantly evaluate and decide on incoming requests for business. Besides practical information like scope and financials we are taking our responsibility towards society serious. As such, we do not want to engage with certain companies and institutions. Such companies might either act unfairly or work in industries we cannot support. Using the following guidelines, we aim to streamline and standardize the process.

Fairness

For Peerigon "Fairness" includes the following attributes:

Honesty
Respecting other people’s freedom
Using resources with proper/equal compensation, e.g.
- Proper payment of workers (no wage dumping/exploitation)
- Paying appropriate taxes when profiting from tax-financed (public) services
- Compensating for negative impact on the environment if avoidance is not possible

In conclusion our definition of Fairness.:

An entity is fair when it strives to avoid the negative impact on its surroundings.

Peerigon

For us, fairness is more than just a word — it's many: Honesty and respect for people and society. Fair wages. Give and take. Sustainable use and protection of resources.
Our understanding of fairness

Process

We have a 2-tier process for evaluating clients:

Quick Check
Ethical investigation group

In order to structure the findings, we created an evaluation template to be filled out in each step.

Quick check

Every potential new project should be evaluated against our guidelines in a quick check. In case of concerns, those should be added to our internal project lead workflow documentation.

Basic research:

Check the website
Check sources (Fair Finance Guide, SIPRI, Tagesschau.de, ...)
Look / ask for clients ethical guidelines
Validate against our No-Gos

Ethical investigation group

In most cases, someone on the team might have more insights regarding certain companies / industries / topics and will inform the team about those concerns.

If this is the case, the person should pick a buddy to work on the ethical aspect of the project following our predefined template. The ethical guidelines group will support you with any questions and ideally one of the group members should join the investigation group.

Notes:

The investigation has to be finished within a week
The investigation should not take longer than 8 hours
Talk to the client openly about concerns
Donations could be interesting because some NGOs have guidelines regarding donations

No-Gos

If a client does any of the following, we won't work with them:

Tax evasion
Arms / weapons industry
Slavery / child labor
Strong environmental offenses

If a client has a customer doing any of the above, we have to discuss it per case.

Decision Process

The Ethical investigation group presents their findings during the following weekly meeting
Everyone with concerns can vote against the project
The founders will consider the investigation and votes and decide about the project in a founders meeting
Everyone should consider consequences - like a potential lack of jobs and financial implications
Someone who voted against the job does not have to be part of the project team