Various organisations recognise the advantages of standardisation especially for a field as recent as corporate responsibility. Still the search is on for guidelines to define good social responsible management.

Standardisation enables:

• Definition of terms;
• Consistency in procedures;
• Development of management systems to guarantee fulfilment and auditing;
• Transparent definitions for the public disclosure of verified information;
• Mechanisms for on-going improvement;
• Encouragement for the market to "fair play";
• Comparability with others.

BSD promotes, implements and verifies the most important social standards. In the field of corporate responsibility this includes AA1000, SA8000, GRI, and ETI. For Fair Trade we follow the criteria of FLO.