Shareholders
The people whose money is at risk in the business — often, in a small company, the same people who run it.
Was sustainable economic value created for the owners and investors of the business?
The seven stakeholders
Every transaction creates value across seven stakeholder categories.
This is the idea the whole platform is built on. It takes about three minutes to understand, and it changes what you notice about every purchase you make afterwards.
The problem
Most people think a transaction looks like this.
Customer→Business→Profit
That's the short version. It leaves almost everyone out.
Money changed hands, so someone got a product and someone got paid. But a single transaction also touches the people who own the business, the employees who did the work, the suppliers who made it possible, the community around it, the environment it draws on, and the people who inherit whatever it builds.
None of that shows up on a receipt. TransparenC exists to make it visible.
The seven
Seven relationships, and the question each one asks.
The questions below are the ones TransparenC puts to every business in the marketplace. They're deliberately plain — they're meant to be answerable by a small business owner, not a sustainability department.
Customers
The people who paid. Not whether they were satisfied in the moment — whether they actually got something worth the money.
Did the customer receive meaningful value in exchange for what they paid?
Employees
The people who did the work. Including contractors and crews, who are usually invisible in a company's own accounting of itself.
Did the transaction support jobs, compensation, opportunity, development, or meaningful work?
Suppliers
Everyone further up the chain — manufacturers, wholesalers, subcontractors, the businesses that had to exist for this one to deliver.
Did other businesses and partners benefit from participating in the value chain?
Community
The place the business operates in. Where the money lands after it leaves the transaction.
Did the transaction positively contribute to the surrounding community?
Environment
The physical resources the work drew on, and what it did to them. Used up, protected, or improved.
What environmental resources were used, protected, restored, or improved?
Future Generations
The people who inherit what gets built — the hardest of the seven to answer, and the one most businesses have never been asked about.
Is the company creating something that leaves people and society better positioned over the long term?
What this is not
It isn't a score, and it isn't a ranking.
The purpose of TransparenC is not to declare that a company is perfect across all seven categories. The purpose is to create transparency around them, acknowledge that they exist, and encourage businesses to continually improve the value they create across the entire ecosystem.
No business does well on all seven. Most have never been asked about several of them. A company that says "we haven't measured this yet" is telling you something more useful than one with a polished answer for every category.
So there's no grade, no certification, and no leaderboard. What a vendor gets is a place to write down what's true, and a community that helps them improve it rather than ranking them against each other.
In practice
Where you'll actually see the seven.
On every vendor profile
Each business writes its own answers, in its own words. Categories they haven't documented are shown as blanks rather than hidden — because a visible gap is honest, and hiding gaps would make the whole section decorative.
In the vendor application
All seven questions are optional and only one is required. Demanding all seven would produce filler, which is the opposite of the point. "We haven't measured this yet" is an accepted answer.
After a transaction completes
When a referral turns into real business, we show what happened because it occurred — not just that revenue changed hands.
Example — illustration only
A $10,000 transaction
- The customer received $10,000 of perceived value
- The vendor generated revenue
- Employees were compensated
- Suppliers received business
- The referrer received a referral payment
- A community and impact contribution was generated
- Additional value may be created over time
An illustration of the idea, not a record of a completed transaction. In the Beta, some of this information is entered manually.
Over time, this becomes a Transaction Map — a visual record of how value moves through an economic ecosystem.
The commitment
What a business agrees to when it joins.
Joining TransparenC doesn't mean a business has hit a standard. It means it has made a commitment:
“We acknowledge that every business transaction affects an ecosystem larger than the buyer and seller. We recognize shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers, communities, the environment, and future generations as stakeholders in the value we create. We commit to transparency, measurement, learning, and continuous improvement across these stakeholder relationships over time.”
Progress over perfection. Transparency over proclamation.
Where it came from
This idea has a history, and we publish it.
TransparenC began as an earlier project called the World Giving Project, written in January 2016. Its first pillar was to inspire other businesses to follow suit into Conscious Capitalism — the thread that eventually became these seven questions.
That original document is published here in full, unedited. Transparency should include our own evolution.
See it on a real profile.
The clearest way to understand the seven categories is to read a vendor's answers — including the ones they've left blank.