About
Sophia Sebastian is a Strategic Communications graduate student at the University of Oregon based in Portland, Oregon. She immediately jumped into grad school after receiving her B.S. in Public Relations with a minor in Sustainable Business.
This capstone research produced the Illumination Index and its underlying scoring framework. Her research sits at the intersection of corporate communication, sustainability accountability, and consumer trust. Sophia believes this is an area where communications scholarship has been largely absent from a field dominated by finance and environmental science.
This is the project Sophia will be working on long after graduation. Greenwashing persists because it's hard to name precisely. The Illumination Index is an attempt to name it precisely.
This project is built primarily for consumers making purchasing decisions. In addition, her hope is that journalists covering corporate accountability, communications professionals working in ESG, or just generally anyone who is curious will find this framework educational and easily digestible.
About Sophia
The major ESG accountability frameworks: MSCI, Sustainalytics, CDP, SBTi, were built for investors and analysts. They measure what companies do, such as emissions output, target-setting, disclosure coverage. None of them measure whether companies communicate that performance accurately and honestly. That is a communications question. It requires a communications instrument. The Illumination Index is that instrument.
Greenwashing persists partly because it has been difficult to name precisely. A vague claim is not a false claim. A strategically omitted data point is not technically a lie. The space between honest and dishonest corporate communication is largely legal, largely unregulated, and almost invisible to the people it's designed to impress.
The Illumination Index is currently a working prototype. The methodology is designed to scale, and this iteration represents the first application of a framework built to grow.
The Illumination Index makes that space measurable.
About The Project
The Illumination Index is a corporate sustainability communication audit tool. It evaluates a single question: does how a company describes its sustainability efforts match what its own data actually shows?
It is not an ESG performance rating. It does not rank companies on how green they are. It measures communicative integrity or a distinct variable that no existing ESG framework currently assesses.
The underlying scoring methodology, the ESG Communicative Transparency Framework, evaluates 11 indicators across two categories: language analysis and data vs. claims. Applied across seven major corporations, with intra-coder reliability tested at k = 0.766.