Building Credibility through Impact Measurement
Today, social impact teams face growing pressure from leadership to justify budgets by demonstrating business value and showing how they contribute to material business priorities. At the same time, companies are navigating heightened expectations from external stakeholders and need trustworthy evidence of impact for customers, employees, and community members. The Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD) is helping formalise how organisations assess and disclose social risks and opportunities, further elevating the importance of understanding and evidencing impact.
Measuring the impacts social investment activities have on the business and on employees enables teams to justify budgets and better engage employees. Impact measurement is necessary to understand the efficacy of programmes and if they’re achieving the intended changes – harnessing decision-useful data. Externally, being able to credibly show the real changes achieved in society enhances consumer and community trust, and prepares companies for external reporting developments, like TISFD, by more clearly evidencing the effects on material issues.
If the relationship between credibility and impact measurement is increasingly clear, what’s holding companies back?
Approaches to Impact Measurement
Social impact practitioners often struggle with small teams and limited capacity, which, coupled with perceived complexity and lack of structure and framework, may put impact measurement on the backburner.
These are some of the challenges B4SI set out to resolve 32 years ago and continues to do today. A framework provides definitions, metrics and an infrastructure to measure, classify and aggregate impacts, and serves as the enterprise-level infrastructure for global social impact strategies.
The first step is knowing what you want to measure, but it’s a step that gets you half of the way there, making partnering more effective and focusing efforts.
According to David Rowsell, Senior Community Engagement Manager for Lloyd’s Banking Group, applying the B4SI Framework supported the business in “going from a programme-led model to a purpose-led model.”
Working with B4SI to develop a bespoke impact framework enabled the team to align their social initiatives more explicitly to their corporate purpose, while strengthening internal management practices:
Across the B4SI Network, companies are increasingly tracking and reporting impact data, with measurement of business impacts being the most significant growth area – especially improvements in stakeholder relations or perception and an uplift in brand awareness.
Member examples highlight the unique ways companies are harnessing impact data to increase credibility both internally and externally, sharing data-driven narratives about how community investment can improve employee morale, support future talent pipelines, and uplift brand awareness.
- Impact measurement has enabled Intrepid “to tell a more cohesive, collective story in its integrated reporting, linking financial performance with social impact,” providing credible data for their B-Corp application.
- Capgemini links community investment to future-ready skills, ensuring a robust talent pipeline.
- Bridgestone measures the impact of employee volunteering on workforce engagement and wellbeing. Its findings showed a 92% increase in employee confidence, pride, and wellbeing, alongside an 89% increase in employees’ sense of belonging to the company. These insights not only demonstrate social impact but also help make the business case for continued investment in employee-focused initiatives.
- Through measuring business impact, “Westpac evidenced that organisations were twice as likely to bank with them after recognising a clear social value proposition—proving the link between impact and customer acquisition.”
As expectations continue to rise, organisations that can clearly measure and demonstrate their impact will be better positioned to build trust, strengthen stakeholder relationships, and ensure their social impact efforts deliver meaningful value for both society and the business.