The full method, because a certification you cannot interrogate is a certification you should not trust.
We get asked one question more than any other, usually by the most sceptical person in the room: how do you certify a culture without surveilling the people in it?
Fair question. Here is the full answer, start to finish. Ask us anything at the end.
Every assessment runs on two instruments at once.
The staff assessment goes to as many employees as possible. It never asks anyone to declare their sexuality, their identity or any demographic box. It asks how the room feels: whether people sense they belong, whether they can be themselves, whether colleagues are hired for what they can do rather than who they are, and whether double standards exist.
It also asks managers what they would actually do in the messy human moments: the overheard joke, the complaint with no witnesses.
The assessment is anonymous. It identifies no individual, and its results are never published or used to rank one organisation against another.
The Big Picture diagnostic goes to senior leadership, and it is where the structure gets examined.
Culture lives in what people feel. Accountability lives in what the organisation has actually built. So we look at the build.
We examine whether the organisation has faced allegations of homophobia, biphobia or transphobia, and precisely how it dealt with them. We look at whether inclusion appears in the mission statement as decoration or as a measurable commitment, and whether it reaches decision making through training, job roles, performance measures and board review.
We ask whether senior managers are accountable for delivery and whether their compensation is influenced by it. We look at employee networks and the level at which they have representation, from staff level to the boardroom.
We examine whether a supplier code of conduct holds the supply chain accountable, and what percentage of suppliers are actually bound by it.
We ask whether every employee has equal access to parental leave, adoption leave and pension schemes. That is worth more points than any other single answer, because equal benefits are where policy stops being words.
We also look at how transparent hiring, promotion and reward decisions really are, including blind application reviews, inclusive language analysis and whether diversity is defined or simply displayed.
The two instruments produce a combined score out of 235, with the staff assessment contributing 50 points. The threshold to enter the programme is 80.
Yes, that is deliberately low, and we publish it because hiding it would suggest we are embarrassed by it. We are not.
The score is a diagnostic, not a grade. It tells us, and the organisation, exactly where the starting line is.
Demanding a high score at the beginning would select for companies that are already comfortable and exclude the ones where certification could change the most lives. Anyone serious can start.
The score does not award certification.
Certification is not granted for passing a diagnostic. It is granted for what happens next, and what happens next is binding.
Every organisation writes a public pledge: dated commitments to be delivered over one to three years.
Two commitments are mandatory for everyone.
The first is the public display of the Pride365 designation across websites, communications and public activity, 365 days a year, not just in June.
This is not vanity. It is the accountability mechanism.
A company that displays the mark publicly cannot quietly drop the commitment. The community, its own staff and Pride365 are all watching the same badge.
The second is tangible support for a nominated LGBT+ charity, backed with money, time or resources throughout the year.
Beyond those two foundations, organisations choose and customise their substantive commitments.
That might mean creating an Ally and LGBT+ Network, delivering Culture First training, auditing advertising and marketing for LGBT+ appropriateness, reviewing policies, making supply chain commitments or asking leaders to go on the record about what the pledge means.
Commitments must be concrete enough to check. Our standard is that a stranger should be able to return later and verify whether each one was delivered.
Then we come back.
Every year, the organisation is reviewed against its own pledge: not against other companies, not against a curve, but against the commitments it wrote and dated itself.
Recertification runs on a three-year cycle, and year three has to show what year one could not: delivery.
Organisations that do not deliver against their commitments do not recertify.
That return matters because culture is not proved on the day a pledge is signed. It is proved in the ordinary months that follow, through leadership changes, budget pressures and the long stretch of the year when nobody is talking about Pride.
No mandatory identity disclosure, ever.
No tracking of individuals.
No league table of certified organisations.
We measure environments and structures, never people.
You cannot audit what nobody says out loud, and you cannot count your way to belonging, so we stopped trying to do either and built this instead.
That is the whole method.
The instruments, the scoring, the threshold, the pledge and the return.
If you are a sceptic, an HR director, a procurement team or a journalist and you want to interrogate any part of it, we would genuinely rather you did.
A certification you cannot question is a certification you should not trust, and we did not build one of those.
We have assessed over 40 companies.
The timeline is usually 6 weeks, and staff participation is usually 30–60%.