The NC State B Corp Clinic is an experiential, impact-driven consulting program hosted by the Business Sustainability Collaborative (BSC) at North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management. Founded in 2015 by Jessica Yinka Thomas, who also serves as the Clinic's course instructor, the Clinic connects interdisciplinary teams of undergraduate and graduate students with aspiring or certified B Corporations to help companies strengthen their environmental, social, and governance performance, often using the B Impact Assessment as a roadmap for improvement.
Over more than a decade, the Clinic has engaged hundreds of students from multiple disciplines and completed over 100 team projects with companies around the world, helping organizations make progress on thousands of impact indicators and, in many cases, move toward B Corp certification.
As part of its work with partner organizations, the NC State B Corp Clinic partnered with Ecolytics to support impact data organization, sustainability reporting, and alignment with B Impact Assessment standards across client engagements, enabling students and companies to organize and apply impact information more effectively throughout the Clinic’s consulting process.
Companies participating in the B Corp Clinic vary widely in size, industry, and sustainability maturity. While many understand the value of the B Impact Assessment and B Corp certification, they often lack a systematic way to capture, organize, and operationalize impact data generated during semester-long consulting engagements.
Previously, students relied on extensive independent research and large collections of shared resources. Information was spread across dozens of documents, making it difficult to navigate, keep updated, and apply consistently across projects.
This created friction for both students and clients. As Rachel Haynes, BSC Program Manager, explains:
“It takes students time to grasp what’s needed for certification and what sustainability reporting looks like. Ecolytics helped them adapt more quickly and accelerate their projects.”
Without a centralized system, the Clinic also faced challenges in maintaining consistency across teams and ensuring that insights generated during engagements could be sustained and built upon over time
The NC State B Corp Clinic sought a solution that would not only support impact assessment, but help students and companies translate sustainability goals into structured, actionable work within real-world consulting engagements.
Rather than continuing to expand internal resource libraries, the Clinic partnered with Ecolytics to replace fragmented, document-heavy workflows with a more structured, scalable, and intuitive system for managing impact data and certification processes. The platform aligned closely with the program’s emphasis on applied learning and practical skill development.
Beyond improving efficiency, Ecolytics also introduced an important experiential component:
“It was a really good exercise for students to learn what it’s like to work with a vendor and do onboarding… and manage that stakeholder along with your client.”
This added a layer of real-world preparation, giving students hands-on experience not just with sustainability frameworks, but with the tools and stakeholder dynamics they are likely to navigate in corporate sustainability roles.
To enhance how impact data is managed and applied during and after engagements, the NC State B Corp Clinic implemented Ecolytics as a shared platform for tracking, organizing, and applying sustainability and impact-related information across client projects.
With Ecolytics in place:
Ecolytics also supported more advanced workflows, such as:
Embedding Ecolytics into the Clinic’s consulting process ensured that impact work became structured, actionable, and transferable beyond the semester, rather than remaining static in final reports.
As a result of integrating Ecolytics, the NC State B Corp Clinic and its partners gained clearer visibility into impact data, certification requirements, and progress across engagements, enabling stronger synthesis of insights within and across projects.
Key outcomes included:
Feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive, with clients describing the platform as more robust than expected and highlighting its ability to surface new insights and streamline complex processes.
Even where outcomes were primarily qualitative, Ecolytics helped move projects from resource-heavy, fragmented workflows to streamlined, insight-driven processes, strengthening the long-term impact of student consulting engagements.
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Looking ahead, the B Corp Clinic plans to continue using Ecolytics to deepen integration into its consulting and teaching models, while exploring opportunities to expand how impact data is aggregated and analyzed across projects.
One future goal is to develop program-level insights, such as tracking collective impact metrics across all client engagements in a given semester or year.
As the Clinic continues to prepare future sustainability leaders and support companies pursuing B Corp certification, Ecolytics will remain a tool for ongoing measurement, learning, and real-world application, helping ensure that impact work extends beyond a single semester and contributes to long-term organizational improvement.
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