To fundamentally improve your organisation’s impact, your purpose and intentions need to be clear, and framed correctly. Otherwise you could end up with initiatives going in every direction. What do you want to achieve? A fully climate positive organization? Improved health and wellness at a lower cost? A fair value chain? A strategy brings focus to your vision. This Impact Strategy, shaped around frameworks like Sustainable Development Goals or a Materiality Matrix helps to channel time, attention and recources into manageable objectives, without losing track of the bigger picture.
Having that framework is critical for success, but not the goal in itself. The point is to quickly translate a vision into actionable plans with clear objectives. Big goals like bringing down poverty, improving equality or a circular economy need to be split up into attainable sub-goals with clear KPI’s. Then those can be shaped into tailor made plans and recommendations for your organisation or project, all based on realistic estimations of timelines, resources and external influences.
This plan can come in the form of an Impact Roadmap, in which we define specific milestones with legitimate KPI’s. Essentially it is a blueprint for continuous improvement. This ongoing learning process should become part of ‘business as usual’ in your organisation. Different organisations and sectors all have their own velocity, but we know from experience NGO’s, investors, businesses and governments fundamentally all walk the same path to get to concrete results.
