So you want to make a difference, right? That’s awesome!
At The Change Agent Hub, we love supporting those who are out there using business as a force for good and creating positive transformation in the world. So, we want to help you create a solid impact strategy that not only will create positive changes but will drive the profitability of your business and attract aligned impact investors for your next round of capital raising.
Often Founders and CEOs are challenged when it comes to measuring their impact. Imagine you decide to end poverty in the world. That’s a very virtuous endeavor but how would you go about measuring this?
In order for measurable impact to be possible the impact strategy needs to be integrated with all of the core strategies for your business, and most importantly, be executable.
At EcoMedia, the company Steven co-founded, the model was to fund environmental initiatives that created measurable impact. In fact the only projects they would fund through their business model had to include measurable impact – meaning they could quantify the impact. For example, one of the goals was to reduce pathogen levels at the beaches because the outfalls from the storm drains that dumped onto the beaches were full of toxins and pathogens. This was making surfers, swimmers and people recreating at the beach sick and it was killing off the kelp forests, which were highly reducing the oxygen levels in the water at the beach.
So in order to select and support the right project that reduces pathogen levels, they had to be very scrutinizing in the business process to identify projects that in fact, produced measurable reduction of pathogens. That was quite a process, just to discriminate which projects actually would do that and which ones were kind of ineffective, looking like they would reduce the issue, but there was no way to measure it. Then, they needed a strategy on how to measure the return on investment as well.
This is why, we like to say that the bar for the impact entrepreneur is actually higher, because not only do they need to produce market rate financial returns making it a lucrative financial business, but they also need to produce measurable impact on top of that! So you could look at that bar being twice as high or you could create a business model which the impact is a byproduct of, which is ideally what you want.
See, impact investors may have a different lens on what ROI means, than regular investors who are only interested in financial returns and don’t believe it’s possible to have both ROI and Impact. However, in the EcoMedia business model they were quite successful at doing both. The model involved creating campaigns with brands, as a media company. So they were a media company doing traditional media for major brands but instead of pocketing all the profits, they reinvested as much as 80% of the media buy into environmental projects. Basically they made enough money to pay the expenses, make a profit and do environmental work in the world.
Creating measurable impact starts with knowing the type of impact you are committing your organization to serving and implementing the important structures for delivering that impact. Once type and structure are foundationed, the ability to measure your impact is in place and it’s time to look at assessments, analytics, KPIs, and reporting. Below are some of the ways to do so:
ASSESSMENTS:
- Skill
- 360°
- Financial
- Social
- Environmental
ANALYTICS & KPI´S:
- Observation
- Input
- Relationship
- Interviews
- Self-Evaluation
- Psychometrics
- Satisfaction
- Happiness
REPORTING AGENCIES:
- ESG Metrics (MCSI)
- CSRHUB (GIIRS)
- SASB – Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
Want to get prepared to raise capital successfully?
Download our Free Fundraising Checklist Here: https://thechangeagenthub.net/fundraising-checklist
Once you receive the checklist you’ll be redirected to a video walkthrough so you can use this checklist most effectively. And you’ll also be invited to check out our 9-step fundraising preparation roadmap with detailed information called Impact Incubator Immersion. This program is the exact process all our impact clients have used to raise capital successfully.
