Goods Unite Us App Exposes Where Public Corporations, Executives Put Their Political Contributions

This startup aims to make it easy for shareholders and all stakeholders to see where public companies and their senior management are putting their political contributions.

A New Level of Transparency
Some Surprising Results

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Goods Unite Us was created to expose the political contributions of corporations and their executives in a way that makes it easy for consumers, employees, shareholders, and ratings agencies to track their contributions by candidates and related causes. This includes services to help organizations identify corporations that create risks based on their donation and related practices and to create ETFs (exchange traded funds) based on the nature of an organization’s contributions to politicians and related causes.

Click here to download the company's free app making it possible to quickly identify the political leanings of thousands of public companies.

Will the transparency of political contributions put pressure on corporations and executives to focus more on making donations to not-for-profit causes rather than politicians? The founders hope so. Explains Brian Potts, the Co-Founder, an attorney, “Both my wife (and Co-Founder Abigail Wuest, also an attorney) and I believe that corporate money including executive money in politics is one of the biggest problems with politics; however, we also feel that regardless of whether you agree with corporate money in politics, transparency is a good thing.”

A New Level of Transparency

Potts says his organization’s services not only can shed more transparency on corporate and executive contributions to the politicians and causes of interest to Americans but can help reduce the inaccuracy and greenwashing prevalent in current ESG (environmental, social, governance) reporting. “Today’s ESG ratings are inconsistent. A company featured in one fund or ETF might not qualify for another. Where companies and their executives put their money says a lot about their priorities.”

In addition to tracking contributions by politician, the company’s new IndexAlign SaaS platform for investors and fund managers sorts the data by issues, including, abortion and reproductive rights; defense spending; government spending on education; environmental regulation; renewable energy spending; gun control; universal health care; immigration control, and social media regulation.

Launched in 2017 by Potts and Wuest, and joined by Chief Investment Advisor Jason Britton, the company uses publicly available Federal Elections Committee data to track political contributions made by companies and their executives, as well as the nature of the causes supported by the recipients of the contributions. The technical challenge, explains Potts, is that the FEC lacks a usable API (application programming interface) to automate access to the data, making it a laborious process to capture and analyze, even with the help of AI.

Some Surprising Results

The data analysis reveals interesting correlations, not always self-event. On the one hand, companies like Apple are more generous to the Democratic party in its donations, while oil giants favor the Republicans. Not so obvious are the companies that many associate with a particular party – like News Corp., owner of the Wall Street Journal, that is in fact funding the opposite party (in this case, Democrats). Or that an impact fund run by the NAACP includes a company making large donations to anti-DEI candidates. (The new SaaS version of the application enables investors to quickly evaluate individual companies in their mutual fund or ETF portfolios.) The analysis has also shown that so-called dark PACs (which attempt to hide the causes supported) receive only a small portion of political contributions, and that President Biden had so far outraised former President Trump from public corporate contributions before having to withdraw from the race.

Click here for a sample of various reports comparing the political contributions of individual companies, including Home Depot, Exxon, Nvidia, and Apple, and two ESG-oriented ETFs.
Charts

Another interesting finding is that the company’s DEMZ ETF has outperformed the S&P 500 since its inception over three years ago, but so has a mock Republican ETF the company created. This indicates that smart portfolio management by its investment manager Jason Britton is more critical to fund performance than political beliefs or interests and that investors need not necessarily take a risk when supporting like-minded corporations on either side.

Since its inception, Goods Unite Us has grown to offer key services to serve both the consumer and investor marketplace.

A free consumer application that anyone can download for free on Android or Apple: the app enables anyone to see the basic political affiliations of thousands of brands and companies, including whether it is red or blue, the company says. Does it fund Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, or soon Kamela Harris? Enter a company name, it explains, “And the app will tell you the political donations made by the company and its senior employees. See information on Apple, Walmart, Patagonia, Koch, AARP, New Balance, Starbucks, AT&T and thousands more. The app has information on clothing brands, home goods, cars, restaurants, universities, sports teams, and much more.” It includes a social media function enabling users to debate politics.

IndexAlign—a new paid SaaS platform designed for registered investment advisors, fund managers and institutional investors comes with more advanced search functions and even more data to better understand the policies being promoted by the politicians and PACs who receive the contributions from public corporations.

pH ratings—a data-driven product designed to measure how likely a company is to face a material backlash from its political and social activities. Worried that a company’s next investment might face a large consumer backlash in the future like what Bud Light faced last year? These ratings are designed to help organizations vet whether corporations are likely to face such a backlash in the future.

ETFs—the organization also licenses its data to and owns a majority stake in the DEMZ ETF and is working towards launching a similar version focusing on Republican donors.

For More Information: info@goodsuniteus.com.

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