A look at some of the most creative and impactful approaches to corporate accountability – and what makes them work.
There is a growing body of evidence showing that the most effective way to change corporate behaviour is no longer through regulation alone. Companies now respond faster to market pressures, such as reputational risk, investor concern, and competitive dynamics, than to the slow grind of regulatory change.
A new generation of campaigners has understood this, and built their strategies around it. Here are five campaigns and tactics that stood out to us.
- Insider change: Follow This
In 2015, Mark van Baal — a journalist frustrated by the limits of what writing could achieve — founded Follow This on a simple idea: buy shares in oil companies, then use the legal rights that come with share ownership to push for change from inside.
The first target was Shell. Follow This filed a shareholder resolution calling on the company to set comprehensive emissions targets — including scope 3, which represents the carbon produced when customers burn Shell’s fuel. That’s roughly 95% of the company’s carbon footprint, and no oil major had ever committed to reducing it.
The resolution got 20% shareholder support, triggering a legal obligation for Shell to respond formally. They adopted the targets. Four other oil majors followed. The combined emissions reductions Shell, BP, Equinor, and Total Energies have committed to amount to around 400 megatons — equivalent to Germany’s entire annual emissions.
Follow This now has over 4,000 members, and institutional investors have gone from passive supporters to co-filers of resolutions. What started with one man buying shares has become a meaningful lever inside some of the world’s largest companies.
- Making pensions less boring: Make My Money Matter
Here’s the gap Make My Money Matter spotted: people changing their diets and cycling to work to cut their carbon footprint, whilst their pension savings quietly funded fossil fuel expansion. Research found £88 billion of UK pension money invested in fossil fuel companies — an average of £3,000 per pension holder.
Nobody was talking about it because pensions are boring. MMMM’s genius was making them not boring. Their signature statistic — that greening a pension is 21 times more effective than giving up meat — became one of the most widely shared climate facts of recent years.
But the campaign wasn’t just clever communications. The real engine was strategic coalition building. They recruited over 120 businesses and organisations — including IKEA, Tesco, BAFTA, and Save the Children — alongside over 30 universities and over 70 Christian institutions, to publicly demand that pension providers clean up their act. Through that, they built a coalition broad enough that pension providers could not dismiss it as a niche interest. Their annual rankings created a “naughty list” no provider wanted to appear on.
As a result, over 60 leading UK pension funds, representing £1.5 trillion in savers’ money, committed to serious net zero targets.
Building relationships to apply pressure: Bite Back
Bite Back campaigns for a food system that fuels healthy people and a healthy planet, and on the marketing of unhealthy food to young people. What sets them apart is their youth board, which plays a key role in leading the organisation and their network of young people, who serve as genuine spokespeople rather than token symbols – trained, articulate, and given real platforms.
As a new organisation, they lacked the leverage to run hard accountability campaigns before building credibility. Their Food Systems Accelerator was the answer: rather than approaching food companies with demands, they invited eight of them — including Tesco, Danone, and KFC — into a structured year-long programme, each company setting a target for improving children’s health.
What the Accelerator achieved was essential: relationships and access. Food companies began sending more senior staff. The cohort issued a joint statement on healthier food standards. And Bite Back emerged with direct relationships that would have taken much longer to build conventionally.
That access enabled the next phase: dividing the food industry into champions — given recognition and platforms — and laggards, who faced public campaigns. Some champion companies even became advocates for the regulations Bite Back was pushing for, recognising they needed a level playing field to implement changes at scale.
Bite Back is now increasingly turning up the volume. In 2025, Bite Back’s young activists took over 365 billboard spaces across London to demand a ban on junk food advertising — their biggest moment to date.
LinkedIn as a pressure tool: People vs. Profiteers
Most people know Nando’s for its peri-peri sauce and cheeky brand personality. Fewer know that the chicken it serves comes from farms linked to serious river pollution. People vs. Profiteers, an organisation focused on creative, fast-moving tactics, decided to make that connection impossible to ignore.
Rather than a petition or press release, they went personal — mobilising supporters to comment directly on CEO Mark Standish’s LinkedIn posts.
Within days of their campaign going public, with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Joanna Lumley lending their voices, Nando’s favourability rating had halved. Standish made his LinkedIn profile completely unsearchable for two months.
The insight behind this: senior executives maintain both institutional and personal reputations. LinkedIn puts professional reputation pressure in a space that is both public and peer-visible — colleagues, investors, and industry contacts can all see it. That visibility creates consequences that conventional corporate communications struggle to manage.
Following the thread: Changing Markets Foundation
Changing Markets Foundation (CMF) is a campaigning organisation working to expose irresponsible corporate practices and drive market-based sustainability solutions.
In 2017, they published a report linking major fashion brands to heavily polluting viscose factories. Several brands acknowledged the findings and asked for a roadmap for improvement. CMF provided one. The brands didn’t sign up.
So CMF shifted its focus away from the brands to a specific supplier, one of the world’s biggest viscose producers based in India. The second investigation was built on ground-level evidence and direct testimony from affected communities. International media coverage gave local concerns a legitimacy that domestic reporting alone hadn’t achieved.
Five fashion brands then committed to the roadmap they’d previously left unsigned.
The principle: consumer-facing brands carry much more reputational risk than their suppliers. Targeting a visible brand creates pressure that cascades through supply chains to less visible players. In this case, the approach worked not by going after the brands directly, but by making the supplier’s behaviour impossible for the brands to ignore.
What these campaigns have in common
Companies rarely act from goodwill alone – they act when their reputation, market position, or their executives’ personal standing is at stake. The most effective campaigns find those pressure points and apply sustained, targeted force: a shareholder resolution, a coalition of pension holders, a focused investigation into one supplier, a well-timed LinkedIn comment.
These organisations have built strategies around that reality. Their approaches are worth understanding — and building on.