2ndVote Scoring Issues, Action Types and Scored Criteria – FAQ
General Scoring Questions:
What issues do you use to score companies? 2ndVote scores corporations against six critical Judeo-Christian and American issues, including:
What actions do you count as scorable? We evaluate the corporate philanthropy, advocacy and policies relating to each critical issue, using a forensic approach to measure both monetary actions and socio-political actions. We apply the same criteria to all corporations for measuring these actions. This ensures an objective and comprehensive approach, but we will inherently miss some contributing factors, especially since many of these corporations have thousands of beneficiaries, partners and affinity groups.
Who does your research? Our full-time research team includes subject matter experts on all of our issues with experience in forensic analysis of data, advocacy and sentiment. Companies being researched by 2ndVote are assigned to analysts in paired teams to ensure as much objectivity and completeness as possible.
Where do you get your data? The research and analysis process involves collecting data from the corporation’s public forms (e.g. IRS Form 990 and SEC Form 10-K). We also collect data from their corporate websites, foundations, philanthropic beneficiaries, partnerships, corporate and executive stances, and many other sources both online and offline. The entire data gathering and analysis process can take anywhere from a day to two months, depending on the company’s size and the accessibility of their information. For example, the research on Verizon took over two months due to the large count of beneficiaries from their corporate donations and matching funds donations listed in their 1400-page Form 990. We study every nonprofit organization they donated to so we can relate those funds, where applicable, back to one or more of our six issues.
How do you deal with extraneous data? In most cases, donations are not related to any one of our issues. Donations to a humane society, or to fight hunger, or to help the elderly – while all good causes – are considered traditional charity and therefore not calculated in our scoring system.
How long does a policy impact a company’s score? Also relevant is the resiliency of the corporate actions. A company may institute a policy that immediately fosters a negative social response and results in the company reversing the action altogether. We do not ultimately score transient actions because we believe companies should be supported in taking corrective actions. Subsequently, Salvation Army’s CRT program was cancelled within a few days of it’s public discovery. Instead of adopting the cancel culture solution, we elected to confirm that their liberal actions were reversed and then notate the action without scoring the action. On the other end of the spectrum, corporate policies and donations that remain in place continue to impact a company’s 2ndVote Score for three to five years, depending on the continuation, duration, and social impact of the action.
Are all actions weighed the same? Each action that we discover is tied to one of our six issues on the basis of measurable impact on that issue. For example, a donation of $10,000 to a pro-life organization adds positive credit to a corporation’s score on Life. Contrarily, a donation to Planned Parenthood, an organization known to engage in infanticide, drops that companies score on Life all the way to an unrecoverable 1.0. We skew the calculation this way because funding the killing of a baby is an act that our algorithms does not allow you to self-redeem. Donations to pro-life or pro-abortion organizations is just one of the actions we track relative to the Life issue.
What specific actions do you score? Within each issue, we categorize corporate actions as either generally conservative or generally liberal, where an action on one side is inversely reflected on the other side. For example, A pro-life stance is generally opposite of a pro-abortion stance. We also identify actions as discretely liberal or conservative if there is no obvious inverse action. For instance, we score support for in-utero research as a discretely conservative action that doesn’t necessarily have a liberal opposite.
Are your scoring algorithms made public? While we do not disclose our algorithms or the scoring impact of our measured actions, we are just now releasing our scoring criteria, which allows our consumer audience and the companies we score to better understand how we score them and what impacts their scores. You can read more about our scoring methodology here. Sanctity of Life is our weightiest issue, as it literally deals in the preservation (or destruction) of innocent life.
What does it mean to be Neutral on an issue? All conservative actions on an issue have a scoring effect that pushes a company above a neutral 3.0. Contrarily, we score liberal actions as detracting from the issue and thus pushing a company’s score on that issue below a 3.0. We celebrate neutrality on these issues almost as much as we promote conservative scores.
Questions on the Sanctity of Life:
Questions on Basic Freedoms:
Questions on The Second Amendment:
Questions on Civil Safe Society:
Questions on Education:
Questions on Environment: