The 3 Questions to Unlock Social Impact
Photo by valérie faiola on Unsplash
Build Your Social Impact Strategy
People often ask us how and where they should start thinking about creating social impact. How do they know what’s right for their organization? And, quite frankly, which search terms should they Google to find out?
Social Impact programs come in many shapes, sizes, and names these days. With all the variations, it can feel overwhelming and confusing to establish or even expand your program. But have no fear, by answering these three simple questions you can navigate your own social impact journey and be sure you’re getting results at every step of the way.
Your answers will form the backbone of your plan and help guide thinking from the jump. Consider these questions to be your North Star that you can revisit as things develop and change.
Are you ready to start your journey? Let’s goooooo! Here are the three questions to unlocking your social impact:
What is your core competency?
How do you create impact internally?
How do you create impact externally?
Sometimes it’s the simplest questions that stump us the most. For funsies, try to answer these questions without further context. Then, read on to unpack each question with our guidance. It’s a fun exercise to see how you interpret these questions independently versus with our prompts. Doing this will help you understand how you can attempt this journey on your own but how having guides will make it that much more painless and, we dare say, fun.
Let’s dig in, shall we?
Question 1. What is your core competency?
In other words, what do you do? If you need help defining that, feel free to check out this classic Harvard Business Review article “The Core Competence of the Corporation” for guidance. Remember, core competencies are different than core products—core products are the manifestation of core competencies. What is the product or service that you sell and can you leverage it in your social impact programs?
“Leadership rests on being able to do something others cannot do at all or find difficult to do even poorly. It rests on core competencies that meld customer value with a special ability of the producer.” —Peter F. Drucker
Campbell’s is an iconic brand that’s been in business for over 150 years. We love when a company with a long history and a solid understanding of its core competency exercises its nimble muscle and creates real impact. A few years ago, New Jersey farmers were paying to send imperfect and damaged peaches to landfill. Campbell’s turned this money wasting food waste into a product opportunity and a philanthropic success. The company developed a peach salsa recipe, adjusted its canning lines, recruited nearly 100 employees to volunteer to pack the jars, and donated the product to the Food Bank of South Jersey to sell. The salsa generated $300,000 in revenue for the food bank and enabled the nonprofit to provide more than 500,000 meals to food insecure residents. This is a superb example of knowing your expertise, creating impact internally (hello employee volunteers), and creating impact externally (turning food waste into community support).
Leveraging your business for social impact isn’t limited to products. You can utilize other skills or values that your organization has in the world. So take stock: what other resources does your organization have?
Other Resources could include:
Money
Talent
Connections
Employees
Members
Influence
Operations/Manufacturing
Brand Awareness
How can you leverage what you do to add social impact value? To get into this, you need to understand your core business strategy. Who are you as a company? What are your business goals?
Know that you will always add more value in an area where you have deep expertise. You will always feel more useful in the world if there is a true human need for your skills. And you will feel more aligned with your purpose if that purpose is also helping to build a better world.
Question 2: How do you create impact internally?
Oftentimes we think of social impact as how we can improve the world at large. The reality is that the world starts inside our own organizations. The environments we create internally undoubtedly influence how we engage with local to global communities. So ask yourself: how are you building a better world for your employees or other internal stakeholders?
How do you create culture? What type of culture do you have now and do you want to change it?
People will work jobs just for the company perks, or because they are so loyal to the brand that they’ll do anything to have more of it. It’s amazing what people will do for companies they care about. So, what will you do for your people? Sometimes all it takes is listening to what they want and building their individual and collective desires into your existing programs. Alternatively, listening might inspire entirely new and exciting programs.
Examples of ways to show up for your employees:
Volunteer Programs / Skills Based Volunteering
Matching Gift Programs
Board Service Programs
Community Grantmaking
Employee Resource Groups
Employee-driven grantmaking is a phenomenal way to foster team-building, develop leaders, build culture, and focus philanthropic initiatives from the bottom up. We love sharing examples and we particularly admire how Adobe is putting this concept into practice. The Adobe Employee Community Fund (ECF) taps into various locations where Adobe employees live and work, calling on them to vote on the most important local issues and then direct allocated funding to their preferred organizations. In 2020, Adobe awarded $4M in local grants (200 grants across 23 Adobe locations). Employee-driven grantmaking empowers staff to create impact while gaining an educational and programmatic experience. It should be noted that in order to truly make these programs work for everyone, it’s essential that your company deploy the funds in a timely manner so the efforts feel effective.
How do you know what your employees care about and want? There are many ways to capture what’s working and what’s not internally. Do you have systems in place for this? And here’s the kicker—if you think creating impact internally is just about programs, think again. We look at it much more holistically than that. For example, are your software platforms user-friendly? Are your applications and other program documents in local languages everywhere you operate? Examining the usability of your systems is part of how your company shows up for employees.
Ready to stop reading and start doing? Click here for our hotline!
Question 3: How do you create impact externally?
Congratulations! You’ve made it to number three! Now, are you able to answer this question: how are you making the world a better place?
Meme inspired by HBO’s Silicon Valley
How do you create positive change for your partners? Your community? Your customers?
There’s another core question to ask yourself when thinking through how to design your programs: what is the story you want to tell? To get to the core of your impact, it’s a good practice to return to the goal of the program and the goals for engaging with external partners. Tesla’s goal as a company was to advance the EV market by 10 years. That’s definitely creating impact.
To truly walk the walk, it’s vital that your organization has stable, long term community impact programs in place. One of the missions of Genentech’s Health Equity & Diversity in STEM Innovation Fund is to provide “catalytic support to individuals and organizations that are pioneering new approaches to remove barriers to high-quality care and inclusive research for people of color”. Genentech found the perfect partner in the Cancer Support Community (CSC), not only by helping the organization serve hundreds of thousands of people living with cancer but also by establishing the first cancer care center on the Navajo Nation (the first of its kind on an American Indian Reservation) and a CSC service center in Washington, D.C., where residents face extreme health inequity. CSC presented Genentech with a Founders Award for Innovation.
While long term programs involve a lot of planning, there are moments when we have less time to act. Lately, it feels like we’re constantly faced with rapid response humanitarian crises from the pandemic to natural disasters to war. Let’s consider the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Deep breath. It’s easy to feel helpless in this particular scenario but there are many ways organizations have identified how they can organically support Ukrainians. For a company like Hilton, partnering with American Express to provide up to 1 million rooms to Ukrainian refugees across Europe as part of #HospitalityHelps made a lot of sense. Depending on your business model, your company might have a range of ways to respond rapidly. Google provided $25 million in financial support as well as in-kind donations. In addition to an employee matching program and direct funding for aid relief in Ukraine, Google also adjusted its search engine to provide refugees and asylum seekers with the most updated resources, waived international calling fees from Ukraine, and supported select humanitarian organizations helping refugees with Google Cloud credits. The ability to execute on these agile efforts is rooted in, you guessed it, long term planning; you need to have the right systems in place to move quickly and effectively.
Of course, just like some folks think if they don’t post on Instagram about it, it didn’t happen, it’s always good practice to know how to tell the story of the impact you’re creating. You should be able to do this with authenticity and transparency: here’s where we are today, here’s what we’re working on, and here’s where we’re going. Sharing your journey can help inspire others as well as help you identify new partners along the way.
If you take the time to think through these three surprisingly profound questions, you’ll be well on your way to creating something meaningful and measurable—something we like to call…creating impact.
