Oportun – Emma Friedl – 2020

Goals

As a mission-driven company dedicated to empowering its customers, Oportun strives to be a leader in all aspects of corporate responsibility. To ensure that its practices consistently minimize harm and maximize good for all stakeholders, Oportun enlisted Emma Friedl to assess its sustainability landscape and develop holistic operational and engagement strategies to advance Oportun’s sustainability vision.

Solutions

To develop an integrated sustainability plan for Oportun, Friedl with the company’s Public Affairs team determined three main phases for the project:

• Conduct a materiality assessment by interviewing and surveying 25+ internal and external stakeholders. This assessment provided invaluable insights into Oportun’s current sustainability performance and helped determine Oportun’s key priorities moving forward.
• Devise enterprise-wide strategies and recommendations for every material topic. Friedl and Robey recommended Oportun establish an executive-led Sustainability Task Force and developed sample initiatives along with a comprehensive Task Force Toolkit to lay the groundwork for successful implementation.

Create a framework for Oportun’s first public Impact report. They compiled resources and drafted an outline for Oportun to publicly showcase its current successes and commit to future goals.

Impact

Through market research, collaboration, and analysis, Friedl helped build a comprehensive repository of viable tailored sustainability initiatives for Oportun to consider. Along with devising a program toolkit which consists of turn-key project and metrics templates for tracking sustainability goals’ progress and performance. 

With an integrated sustainability program, a centralized program measurement approach, and a committed leadership, Oportun is poised to further advance the positive impacts of its sustainability initiatives.