Taking the First Step: A Roadmap for Businesses Embracing Social Impact and Purpose
In the spring of 2000, I got a wild hair to run a marathon. Until college, I’d never been all that athletic, but I had long had this fascination with marathons. When I stepped foot into my dorm room my freshman year, I just so happened to be paired with two members of the university track team. As freshman year got underway, I took up running as a way to get fit and keep the “Freshman 15” off.
Fast forward three years and a lot of miles later, my running partner casually mentioned she was thinking about running a marathon, and that was all the push I needed. I bought two books - yes, this was before there was a plethora of information on the internet - and pieced together a plan for beginners. I mapped out the five-month training guide on my calendar, made the commitment, and got started.
The process and resources were there, but I had to go looking. The same is true as more and more businesses recognize their role in and the importance of addressing social challenges. Those businesses that have embraced the idea or are impact-curious are actively seeking ways to incorporate purpose-driven initiatives into their operations but are often easily overwhelmed by the how.
In this blog post, I’ll guide you through practical steps to help your business get started with social impact. By following these strategies, you can begin the process of aligning your organization's goals with the needs of your local community and beyond and create the change you really want to see in the world.
Step 1: Define Your Social Impact Goals
The first step is to clearly define social impact goals that resonate with your organization's values and purpose. Much like with my marathon prep, I needed to get to the heart of why I was doing it and what I wanted to accomplish along the way.
Start by examining your business mission and identify how it can be expanded to address a social challenge that’s important to you. Map out your goals, why they’re important to you, note some of those initial ideas for bringing them to life.
You may also consider taking a look at other businesses in your industry to see what they’re doing. This gives you a rough benchmark you can use to determine how much more or less you want to do.
These goals create the foundation for your social impact journey.
Step 2: Assess Your Current Operations
Once you’re clear on your organization’s social impact goals, conduct a comprehensive assessment of your current business operations to identify areas where you’re already doing work that’s naturally aligned with your goals, where opportunities exist to tweak your approach, and where social impact can be integrated in new and exciting ways.
This might include your approach to employee hiring, well-being and development, diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, your approach to sourcing products, areas where you’re involved in the community, corporate volunteerism, and client and stakeholder engagement. This article won’t touch on the environmental side of things, but there are tons of ways you can decrease your environmental footprint, if that’s the direction of your impact goals.
This assessment will give you the tools and information for improvement and potential avenues to explore for your social impact initiatives.
Step 3: Engage Your Stakeholders
This may seem obvious, but when you have people onboard with your goals, you have to keep them in the loop, especially if they’re going to be impacted by your actions. When I was thinking of signing up for the marathon, I knew I needed to check with the people around me - my roommates, my boyfriend, my training partner, and my parents. This wasn’t about asking for permission; it was about bringing them into the process, knowing I’d need their support to be successful.
Engaging your stakeholders in the process will dramatically increase your chances of successfully activating your social impact initiatives. When you know what’s important to everyone in your ecosystem, it gives you the information you need to ensure your social impact initiatives are relevant, responsive, and aligned with the expectations of all your stakeholders.
It also increases their buy-in and the likelihood they’ll be willing to shift and adapt once you’ve identified what these impact strategies will look like in real life. It also gives you insight into who you might need to offload when there’s no longer alignment.
When you keep the lines of communication open, you build trust, foster stronger relationships, generate a stronger sense of ownership, and lay the foundation for accountability along the way.
Step 4: Identify Social Impact Strategies
Now that you have defined your social impact goals and engaged your key stakeholders, it's time to identify specific strategies to achieve social impact. Consider the unique strengths and resources of your business - your human talent, your business network, your physical assets… - and how they can be leveraged to create positive change.
For example, if you’re a technology company, you might explore initiatives that bridge the digital divide or promote digital literacy. If you run a cleaning business, you might use environmentally friendly products, pay living wages to your employees, and advocate for labor laws that support traditionally marginalized communities. In my case, I’m able to provide pro-bono business consulting to women in Egypt that leverages my entrepreneurial experience and my ability to speak Arabic.
Tailor your strategies to align with your business capabilities and the societal needs you aim to address.
Step 5: Implement and Monitor Progress
Just like any other project, implementing your social impact initiatives requires clear action plans, dedicated resources, and effective project management. Break down your strategies into actionable steps, assign responsibilities to team members who are especially eager to support these projects, and establish a timeline for implementation. Regularly monitor and evaluate your progress to ensure you’re on track to achieve your goals.
Measuring impact is a growing field of study. You need key performance indicators (KPIs) that are aligned with your social impact objectives and a plan for tracking progress over time. The longer you do this, you’ll note that there are tons of ways you can approach measurement and that not all of your KPIs will be able to accurately showcase the true impact your business is making. I’ll tackle measurement in more depth in another article, but for now, be proactive about collecting and tracking data. Having a data-driven approach will simplify your ability to measure and communicate the impact of your initiatives to stakeholders.
Step 6: Collaborate and Amplify Impact
Above, I mentioned you can’t do this work alone or in a vacuum. Collaboration is a powerful tool to amplify your social impact. There are tons of opportunities to collaborate with like-minded businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies and to pool your resources, expertise, and networks together to amplify your collective impact.
Through partnerships, you can leverage collective strengths to tackle complex social issues more effectively. Collaborative efforts also provide opportunities for knowledge sharing, innovation, and scaling impact beyond what your business can achieve alone.
The process of embarking on a meaningful social impact journey isn’t complicated when you have a clear roadmap. Social impact is an ongoing commitment, rooted in a deep desire to create the change you want to see in the world, and it requires continuous learning, adaptation, and improvement. Embracing purpose-driven initiatives will not only benefit society but also enhance your brand reputation, attract socially conscious customers, and create a positive work culture that inspires your employees.
If you’re curious to learn more about how your business can get started, book an Impact Discovery Call today.
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