Tracking and measuring your impact

Starting a climate impact program – as I’ve mentioned a lot here – is a great thing to do for a great many reasons (good marketing, investment opportunities, invitations to collaborate, many more).

One of the challenges you’re likely to come up against though, is how you’re tracking and measuring that impact.

There are many, yet imperfect, systems to measure impact. You’ll see things like ESG (environmental, social and governance) being spoken about a lot – the methods for measuring vary massively.

From the words of investors, if you’re a startup they don’t want to see you blasting your investments away on measuring things so early on when you should still be focused on product development, customer research and so on. Once you have traction, measuring becomes more impactful.

As a mature business, tracking and measuring is more important but can still be quite ad-hoc (still in the words of investors).

In both cases, a good strategy here might look like this:

• Frame a story about why you’re sustainable, impactful, low-carbon or whatever
• Pick things you’re able to measure in real numbers (eg: 78% more power purchased from renewables, 96% less plastic used in packaging)
• Keep track, and post updates regularly either in an Annual Report, or (even better) on a public page on your website.

More and more, people are looking for real evidence of your claims – investors are already looking, and the banks are even being asked by regulators to start factoring the effects of climate change into credit decisions.

Tracking what you can as genuinely as possible, if nothing else, is a good future-proofing strategy.