App matches consumers with businesses that hold the same values

Glia enables consumers to discover the values of local businesses — empowering them to spend their dollars at places that are compatible with their own beliefs.

Faced with so much choice, consumers are increasingly looking to associate themselves with brands that maintain ethical practices. We have already seen platforms such as Slavery Footprint and aVOID, which help consumers stay away from products associated with forced or child labour. Now, the new Glia app is taking into account a consumer’s full range of social, political and economic values — enabling them to differentiate between the businesses that support those beliefs and those which work against them.

To begin, consumers create a profile on the Glia smartphone app, inputting their social, political and economic values by completing a simple poll. They place the causes they wish to support in order of importance and highlight deal-makers and deal-breakers. The app then informs the user of how compatible nearby businesses are with the consumer’s core beliefs. The team behind Glia have undertaken extensive research into the practices of the 200 largest businesses in the US, which feeds into an algorithm that produces comprehensive scores to guide the user. Ultimately, this score then enables users to support the causes they care about and avoid spending money at places which work against them.

Glia is similar to BuyPartisan — launched last year in the US — which positioned itself as ‘a nutritional label for your political values.’ Glia develops the service by acknowledging that there are many grey areas within political alliances, and integrates wider beliefs beyond companies’ political spending. Are there other platforms which could encourage informed spending from consumers?