HOW TO TELL A COMPELLING IMPACT STORY
Start off by thinking about what you’re trying to evidence and what you’re currently measuring to do so. For example, by attempting to demonstrate how you’re aligning to SDG 6 on Clean Water and Sanitation you measure your water consumption (baselined) and implementation rates of water stewardship projects.
Once you have an idea of what evidence you have to tell your story, use this to populate an impact framework. This involves mapping out the causal links between your inputs (i.e., your activity), the outputs of your activity, and the outcomes or changes associated to this. This will reveal where you have data gaps that prevent you telling a compelling story. Usually, this is the outcome – or the ‘so what?’ or your activity. To use the above example of Goal 6, you’re doing lots of work to reduce your water consumption – but is this pushing more sustainable behaviour in the business? If it is, this is a much more engaging narrative than showing year-on-year water efficiencies. Plug your data gaps and transform your story-telling.
Having the right data is half of the battle – the other half is using it effectively. Think of it as having a huge spreadsheet with all of your data. Giving this spreadsheet to someone and expecting them to derive meaning from it isn’t going to work. With a spreadsheet you’d use a pivot table to help people make sense of a sea of figures, cutting the data and telling your stakeholders the story they want to hear. This should apply to your reporting, too. Perversely, doing all this work and putting it all into one report for all is careless – it’s like running a great race and falling at the last hurdle.
Finally, you know what information you need to tell your story, and you know what stories your stakeholders want to hear. Think about how you tell these stories – what are the channels that bring them to life and drive engagement for your respective cohorts? Does it make more sense to try and convince the general public of your great community work through a report, or through a social media campaign? I really enjoyed Heineken’s “Let’s Get Frank” video which set out to amplify the reach of their sustainability strategy.
SIMPLICITY
We all know that reporting encompasses non-optional regulatory, standards-based, and operational requirements. However, the way we communicate our CSR and sustainability efforts needs to be a lot simpler. Businesses can catalyse behaviour change but to do so we all need to think about how we connect with different audiences and make these issues chime with them. The key to that is simplicity – give people a clear message that helps them make sense of the myriad things going on around them.
Bob Marley is one of my heroes – not a in a cliché way, I hope, but because of how his ideas and messages reached people all over the world and took them over in a deeply personal way. I’ll leave the last word on simplicity of communication to the man who communicates it so beautifully simply: