Nine years building the software that runs Green Globes certification

A certification program is only as strong as the software behind it.

For nine years, Empathy Works has been that software — building, and rebuilding, the platform GBI's entire certification program runs on.

The work that has to keep up

The Green Building Initiative (GBI) is a nonprofit that certifies how sustainable a building is. Its flagship program, Green Globes, is a science-based, whole-building certification that rates commercial real estate on environmental performance, health and wellness, and resilience — at every stage of a building's life, from design through to the spaces people work in today.

That sounds tidy on paper. In practice, a certification program is a mountain of moving parts: assessments that run to hundreds of questions, worked on by several people over days; expert reviewers trading revisions with building owners; scoring rules that have to be exactly right; reports that have to be trusted; and a growing catalogue of assessment products, each one a little different. For years that work lived in bespoke one-off tools and Excel spreadsheets — slow to change, easy to get wrong, impossible to scale.

And a program with ambitions to grow — more products, more buildings, more countries — can only move as fast as the software underneath it. That is the problem GBI brought us in 2017, and it is the through-line of everything since.

2017 — An engine for certification

GBI didn't want another one-off tool. They wanted a platform: somewhere they could design, test, and launch a new assessment product themselves, without a development cycle for every change — and one powerful enough to handle the real complexity underneath, from GBI's scoring and data processing to the back-and-forth between clients and the Green Globes Assessors who guide them.

So we built it. A single custom platform that runs every Green Globes product, instead of a tool per product. Assessments hundreds of questions long that multiple people work on together over days. Revision tracking and in-platform communication, so owners and expert assessors stay in sync. A scoring engine that grades everything from a single headline number down to an individual element. Automated, high-quality report generation. And portfolio-wide analysis, so an owner can compare every building they manage and see where to act first.

It launched in 2017 and became the engine behind the program — eventually powering 42 assessment products. Fully custom, and still ours to evolve.

2019 — One home for everything

Success brought its own problem. GBI had been operating for over twenty years, and its products had accumulated across different tools and platforms over time — each with its own login, its own account, its own way of doing things. A customer with buildings in three programs had three disconnected places to manage them. Re-certifying a building, or moving it to a different assessment, meant starting over.

In 2019, GBI asked us to build the home that tied it all together: one account, one place, every project and every building — no matter which tool actually ran the assessment underneath.

That meant meeting twenty years of history head-on. We consolidated data from every legacy tool into a single portal with single sign-on, a consistent interface, and a permission system that lets a customer share one project or an entire portfolio — with access flowing through to each assessment tool automatically. We gave clients a visual project directory they can view as cards, on a map, or as a table, with filtering, grouping, and bulk actions — so an owner can import dozens of buildings at once, or start a new project from an existing one as a template.

The detail we're proudest of is the least visible. Rather than force twenty years of users to reset their passwords, we reverse-engineered the authentication encryption from GBI's legacy tools so everyone could simply log in to their new account. The payoff came during a two-day launch window, when years of data — cleaned and imported by tooling we'd built for the purpose — landed in the new portal and just worked.

We also pulled GBI's stack apart, in a good way: decoupling their public website (WordPress) and their training and education platform (a LearnDash LMS) from the core portal, so the team could change content and run courses without touching engineering — while everything stayed tightly integrated.

That single home now holds every certified building in one place — a directory that has filled in across North America over two decades:

Then, scale — in two directions

With the engine and the portal in place, GBI's ambitions pointed outward.

Measuring what actually happens in a building. A certification is a snapshot; owners increasingly wanted to track performance over time. We built a tracker around ENERGY STAR — the U.S. government's building-energy program — that pulls in energy, water, and waste data automatically, reports each building against its own baseline and trend, and rolls the whole portfolio up so an owner can see which buildings to prioritize.

Going global. Building standards aren't universal — criteria, currencies, and tax rules all change by region — so taking Green Globes international was far more than translation. We combined AI-powered automatic translation with expert manual overrides, so GBI's team can fine-tune technical content for each region rather than accept a literal translation, and we built regional billing and taxation in underneath. Today the same assessment ships in English and several more languages.

Where it stands today

Nine years on, Empathy Works is GBI's software backbone. The custom platform we built — and keep building — has certified thousands of buildings, runs 42 assessment products, and operates across multiple regions and several languages: the assessment engine and the portal their customers live in, both fully custom, both ours to grow as the program does. Behind it all, the platform has now processed close to three million assessment answers.

A certification body lives or dies on whether its software can keep up with its ambition. For nine years, GBI's has.