We recently ran the second impact workshop for the Impact Central cohort. This workshop brought together our earlier work on impact and drew on other areas that the accelerator had focused on since, including brand building and storytelling with Stewart Bewley and leadership and team-building with Steve Cockerham.
With a couple of weeks to go before the showcase night, it was important to increase the focus on what start-ups would need to communicate with potential partners, investors and stakeholders, with a clear view on the impact problem they are working to solve how they will go about solving it.
Our priority was defining initial impact indicators, a methodology for collecting these, then building out an ‘impact thesis’ for each startup. The thesis draws on the cohort’s work on pitching combined with the core activities from our first sessions on impact – the Theory of Change and the Impact Management Project’s five dimensions of impact – and criteria drawn from the International Finance Corporation’s Operating Principles for Impact Management.
Our view on what to include in the impact thesis draws on what customers or investors want to know about an impact business. As with the outputs of the first impact session, the intention was not that the impact theses would be written in stone, rather it was to get the founders thinking about the sorts of issues and questions they would be expected to have a position on by interested stakeholders.
The areas we cover in our impact thesis are as follows:
What is the problem your business will solve?
What issue are you developing a solution for?
What injustice are you trying to repair?
What environmental challenges keep you awake at night?
In this, the ventures drew on the pitch session with Stewart Bewley, thinking about how to describe the problem while drawing your audience into your story.
What is your vision for a world without this problem?
What would a world where this problem is eradicated be like?
How would it look different to how it is today?
A couple of examples we talked through were a world with no plastic waste and a world where nobody suffered from obesity.
How will you solve this problem?
What will you do that will contribute to solving this problem?
How will what you do create this change?
In this part of the thesis, the ventures returned to their theory of change.
How do you line up to the five dimensions of impact?
In this section, the start-ups revisited the five dimensions of impact:
What KPIs will you measure on impact?
What indicators will you use to know if you are making progress?
What details will add credibility and authenticity to your story?
How will you know that you are making this change, and how will you collect this information? (We will go into this further in a follow-up blog soon)
How will investment help you create more impact?
What difference would raising investment make on the impact of the start-up?
What are your plans for the future of the start-up?
This could be, for example, fund product development costs linked to impact, increase sales and marketing activity directly that boosts impact centric growth or specialist team members.
To see how the latest Impact Central cohort drew on their impact thesis in their pitches, you can watch the showcase event online here.