Sustainable CRM for Eco & Ethical Businesses
Fern CRM offsets digital pollution, plants trees, AND donates to social and environmental causes to cover the time you spend and the messages you send from your CRM dashboard.
This page is our up-to-the-minute impact report for 2026 that shows our current impact stats, updated in real time by our automations. This page also talks briefly about how we measure our impact, our sustainability goals, action plans, and the businesses we work with (and who we won't work with.)
Looking for info about the tool itself? Click here for sustainable CRM details
April 2026
Impact Report
for the Fern CRM community
Intro
Our People
Our Impact
Metrics
Goals
Action Plan
Metrics
Goals
Action Plan
Intro To Fern CRM
Fern CRM is an all-in-one customer experience and customer relationship management tool that helps ethical businesses grow from the inside out, so they can boost income, not expenses.
Users get expertly-built customer relationship systems and ethically managed CRM tools while we plant trees and offset carbon pollution to make each business cleaner, greener, and leaner.
We also donate 4% of every purchase to social and environmental causes because we believe businesses have the power to change the world.
This impact page shares the details of exactly what we've achieved as a community of ethical businesses and is automatically updated in real time as our impact changes. We'll link to the actual impact report (including how much we donated and where donations went) when it's published in May 2027.
Fern CRM is the sustainable CRM choice
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For the time you spend inside the tool:
Fern CRM removes roughly 1,000 grams of carbon pollution for every ONE GRAM of pollution created by our users for all the time they spend inside their Fern CRM dashboard and every minute spent in the communities they built with the Fern CRM tools!
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For the things you send from inside the tool:
We offset roughly 8 emails for every 1.4 emails sent from inside Fern CRM!
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For every month you renew your subscription
We plant a tree every month for every user and users have the option to earn tree points towards planting more trees.
We donate 4% of every purchase price to social and environmental causes.
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Impact tracker inside the CRM
You can track your individual contributions and our collective impact inside your personalized Impact dashboard, located right inside the CRM itself, that's instantly updated in real time as impacts happen.
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Ethically owned and operated
Fern CRM was created, from the very beginning, as a tool for change and an activist brand. We're anti-fascist, anti-racist, and pro-LGBTQIA2s+, native rights, land back, POC, DEI, fair trade, fair wages, sustainable supply chains, environmental protection, and more.
We practice what we preach, use our influence to speak out and raise awareness, and we prioritize people and the planet over profits.
This tool isn't perfect, but it's the best we've found thus far to help eco and ethical business owners outperform the greedy corporations that DGAF.
Fern CRM certifications
Our pledge to working with businesses that aren't polluting the planet.
Our pledge to using ethical marketing practices & prioritizing customer success.
Our pledge to continue learning & give back to the ethical business community.
Our People
Fern CRM is has a small but growing community of ethical business owners who genuinely care about how their business impacts people and the planet.
Most of our users aren't B-Corp certified, but practice B-Corp standards.
They genuinely care whether the people buying their goods and services are getting results. They care about diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in their workforces, supply chains, customer communities, and society. They believe every human deserves to be paid well for the work they do based on fair wages, not what country the work is performed in.
They care about the environmental impact of their online and offline business practices.
Some are tiny businesses focusing on getting their first 50 customers and aren't ready for B-Corp style certifications yet. Others are medium to large sized businesses with corporate clients and high-ticket offers but no supply chain or team members to assess.
And others (like Fern CX and CRM) donate more than 1% of revenue but don't pay for badges or certifications so that more of the money goes to the people who need it most. (But we LOVE 1% For The Planet as an organization!)
Our goal is to help every type of business that gives a damn to outperform those that don't, by giving them the tools and community to dream bigger and do better.
Who we don't work with:
As our checkout pages and Terms clearly state, we reserve the right to deny service and/or refuse to work with any company that profits from fossil fuels, supports fascism, and/or uses unethical business practices.
We do not work with nor tolerate people or businesses that are wrecking the environment, treating employees like disposable labor, or supporting oligarchy, racism, or kakistocracy.
Our Impact
THE NUMBERS
At a glance, here's Fern CRM's 2026 impact as of April 11:
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Donations accrued in 2026: $301.38
Total donations since we launched in 2024: $901.38
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Trees planted: 54
Total trees planted since 2024: 366
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Carbon pollution offset: 8561 KILOGRAMS of carbon pollution
Total pollution offset since 2024: 38483
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The amount of pollution we've removed so far this year is equivalent to the pollution created by 17122 hours of Zoom meetings or 503588.24 long marketing emails read on a laptop.
This means we're removing roughly 1,000 grams of carbon pollution for every ONE GRAM of pollution created by our users for all the time they spend inside their Fern CRM dashboard and every minute spent in the communities they built with the Fern CRM tools!
It also means we're offsetting 8 long marketing emails for every 1.4 emails sent from inside Fern CRM!
HOW WE CAME UP WITH THESE NUMBERS
The donations and trees planted is calculated by our automations every time someone makes a purchase or pays their monthly/annual payment. And the carbon removal is calculated every time someone uses the pay-as-you-go features (email, SMS, phone calls, premium workflows, AI, etc.)
While we can't actually guarantee our users are carbon negative or neutral (because we value privacy and thus don't track CRM usage beyond receipts, AND there are other variables that affect the total pollution, like which device they use when they're accessing Fern CRM...)
Instead, we calculated how much pollution our heaviest users use and then offset 500-100 times that amount of pollution for every user.
By our calculations, a heavy Fern CRM user probably spends about 40 hours/month inside their Fern CRM dashboard and/or communities during a normal month. (It's me, I'm the heavy user!) To avoid greenwashing, we're going to call this "normal" usage.
If they're a new user who is learning the tool and building new things, or an experienced user preparing for a big launch, that might double to 80 hours/month once in a while.
We spent our March 2026 Team Retreat researching how much energy is used, how different laptops and tablets affect the impact, and how much pollution is created for the different types of usage. By our calculations, it's fair to say that using Fern CRM creates around 15 grams of CO2e pollution per hour, on average.
That comes out to 600 grams per month for normal use and 1200 grams per month during learning and launch phases.
When we offset 600 THOUSAND grams per month, per user, we're way over compensating to make sure all types of usage are covered! (That's enough to cover a team of 60 people using the tool 24 hours a day for a whole month!)
And we calculate things like emails, phone calls, texts, etc. separately because we have the receipts for everything sent from Fern CRM. This means we can get even more accurate with ensuring we're offsetting enough pollution for those activities, beyond just the time spent working on them.
Fern CRM's ethical impact
Our impact beyond donating, planting, and offsetting...
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Fern CRM provides Impact Templates (automations/pages/systems) to our users, so they too can calculate and track the impact their business and communities make and display it. (Like the page you're reading right now!)
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And (you may have noticed), we often use social media platforms to speak out, raise awareness, and support other do-good businesses and changemakers.
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We also provide one free CRM account (with no expiration date) to a do-good business-in-need each year.
Our "scholarship" users get the same support and resources as any other member. (In fact, they tend to use the support more and really get a lot out of it!)
Metrics
Here's how we calculate and document our impact and impact reports.
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Fern CRM's automations include a math operation that can calculate all kinds of things. Every time anyone buys anything from us, that purchase triggers an automation that multiplies the purchase price by 0.04 and then adds that number to the CRM user's individual contributions as well as the collective impact tally.
We use Stripe Climate to donate 1% of every purchase to carbon removal projects. You can see details here: Fern CRM's Climate Impact Page
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We use Fern CRM's automations to add a tree to each user's individual grove as well as the collective forest, each time a user pay's their monthly bill.
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Emails, SMS messages, minutes spent on the phone, and certain other things are on a "pay-for-what-you-use" system that helps us keep costs low for every user. We regularly analyze our itemized receipts to make sure our carbon removal is overcompensating for the pollution created by these activities.
This Impact Report page uses "custom values" which are little snippets of code that are automatically updated by the automations in real time. This is the same Fern CRM feature we use to keep our CRM users' individual impact dashboards up-to-date.
2026 Impact Goals
Believe it or not, Fern CRM is still relatively new, even though its founder has been in business since 2015. (We're exiting beta in May 2026)
So our goals are small right now but growing!
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Our goal for 2026 is to plant an additional 120 trees and donate an additional $500, based on CRM purchases alone. (Not counting any of our other offers.)
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We also want to partner with a well-known brand that shares our values. Someone like Redwood Empire or another B-corp brand!
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We also plan to increase the amount of and types of support we can offer our users. When it's time to hire, we'll be looking for someone who shares our values and can bring a diverse perspective to the team.
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Sometime in 2026 or 2027, we'd like to create a page that highlights the good work being done by the brands that use Fern CRM (with our users' permission of course!) It'd be great to see the bigger picture of the difference we're making as an ethical community working towards a brighter future.
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As we step out of our beta phase in May 2026 (what we've been calling our "Founder" phase), our goal is to get much more vocal and visible.
We'll position Fern CRM as the eco and ethical alternative to the business tools that are secretly (and not so secretly) funding fascism, racism, destruction of the planet, and shareholder profits over everything else.
2026 Action Plan
Goals are just dreams without a plan of action... Here's what we're working on:
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As we transition out of our beta phase, we'll be launching our referral plan so that our happy customers can be the first to benefit from spreading the word.
We're rewriting the home page to reflect our commitment to being the eco and ethical alternative for businesses that care about where their money goes and what it's secretly supporting.
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We're in talks with a couple B-corp and B-corp-adjacent peers to use the CRM for themselves and their clients.
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We have an SEO strategy designed for how different search is in 2026, that we'll be implementing in Q3. Using the built-in Fern CRM features to publish blog posts, Google Business Profile updates, and updating the schema on each of our public facing web pages.
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We're also researching digital pollution and looking for ways we can do more for our customers to be eco-friendly, not just offsetting after the fact. We'll be sharing our discoveries on social media, blog posts, and maybe workshops.
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Last, but certainly not least, we'll be participating more in the ethical marketing communities we're part of. We want to share our customer relationship expertise with others and learn from other perspectives "in the trenches" of digital media.
Thank you for reading!
Maybe visit the home page next?
Our Values
We donate 4% of all revenue to social and environmental causes and another 1% to carbon removal.
We’re committed to ethical marketing practices and customer success.
We’re committed to working with businesses that aren't polluting the planet.
For The Planet 🌍
Our blog is cleaner than 90% of web pages tested by Website Carbon Calculator. It emits the amount of carbon that ONE tree absorbs in a year at only 0.1g of CO2 per visit and is running on sustainable energy.
Our CRM platform offsets 5 times the CO2 pollution for every email and text message sent PLUS 200-750kg of CO2 per month per account to offset all the time spent in the tool by every account user.
For The People ✊🏿✊🏾✊🏽✊🏼✊🏻✊
We believe every human being should feel safe to express their identity however they choose. We support women, BIPOC, LGTBQIA2s+, and other underrepresented people.
We are committed to anti-racism, accessibility, and creating communities that actively work towards inclusion and safety.
Our Mission 💌
Our goal is to replace the Bezos, Musks, and DT's of the world with business owners who give back, who make a difference, and who actually care about people and the planet. We’re here to show you how to outperform the greedy corporations that have been wrecking society for far too long.
We practice integrity, transparency, and sustainability in everything we do.
Our main office is located on the beautiful, unceded traditional territories of the Ohlone, Muwekma, and Lisjan people and we are very grateful for this opportunity to raise awareness and help with stewardship of this land until it is returned. Learn more here: Indigenous Land Acknowledgement
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