The corporate social impact landscape has changed dramatically over the last few years. Employees, customers, shareholders, investors and partners are demanding that corporate organisations go further in demonstrating tangible social and environmental impact.  The Social Impact Measurement Network Australia (Sydney Chapter) was hosted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), along with a star-studded panel of speakers from Lendlease, Premier and Cabinet and PwC. Our speakers discussed the challenges and opportunities corporate organisations have around measuring social impact.  

Many corporates are still thinking about risk and return before they think about people, profit and planet. Risk and return is a traditional and conservative approach to reviewing investments and projects. With the growing push to act on things like climate change, gender equity, cultural diversity, health and wellbeing (to name a few), making decisions from a lens of risk and return can lead to limited or stalled impact. Panelists suggested that senior leaders find a balance between the impact the investment would have on people and planet as well as risk and return.

Creating social impact improves employee engagement and connection to organisational purpose. With trends like ‘the great resignation’ and ‘quiet quitting’ swirling through the workforce, it’s fair to say that organisations are rethinking the way they retain their workforce. Some of those organisations use employee driven social impact initiatives as one of their mechanisms to keep their employees engaged e.g. grant opportunities, volunteering days, employee giving. Other organisations take a more strategic approach and set their impact agenda as part of the organisational or social impact strategies. With a dedicated strategy, organisations are able to stay on course to meet pre-set targets, hold themselves accountable and use it as a tool to make decisions on what they will and won’t invest in e.g. when a Chair has a personal project that they want the company to invest in and it doesn’t fit within the strategy.

The beneficiary is the most important stakeholder when it comes to corporate social impact. Engaging beneficiaries is the best way to understand the needs, challenges and desires of the community that social impact initiatives will serve. Through this engagement organisations are able to tailor their objectives to meet these needs, utilising an ‘ask vs tell’ approach.

Bring people on the journey and inspire through data. With any new initiative or investment, people need to be brought on a journey. This is about inspiring the workforce with your strategic objectives around impact, which includes timely communications and engagement with leaders at the right time to champion change.

Reporting on the other hand is something that may scare you or excite you, depending on how good your systems are. Our panelists highlighted that sometimes it can be challenging to report on the S – social and G- Governance of ESG (Environmental, social and governance). To support the process of reporting, it’s important to ensure there are strong and regularly updated business processes to support social impact reporting, finding champions who will adopt new business processes, and having appropriate systems in place to capture social impact measurement data. But it’s not just about the systems, it’s also about agreeing with leaders, what data you will measure and how it relates to the organisation’s overall targets in its strategic objectives and impact agenda.

Author: Kuppal Palaniappan, SIMNA Sydney