Social Purpose Strategy – 6 Elements to Make It Sticky
A key to cultivating purpose and impact across an organization
In an era where global events can pull everything right from underneath your feet, building and managing a brand can feel overwhelmingly ambiguous. Its not longer a question of whether climate change will impact a companies ability to operate or grow but rather a question of how much and in what ways it will impact a sector, a company, a brand. One of the best tools to protect your brand in moments of uncertainty is a purpose-driven strategy that is not just an aspirational list of business goals but incorporates elements of impact across business operations, performance, and long-term success. It is a comprehensive action-oriented tool that enables strategic decisions and actions that you as a brand can be held accountable to annually, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and you got it - daily.
Sustainability and impact goals are meant to drive the bottom line through a comprehensive approach utilizing a green and social purpose lens across the brand - internally and externally. It is not a method to increase brand awareness through green-washed marketing efforts, although that is often a strategy we see across the market these days. A strategy is meant to support a brand's ability to achieve goals not to collect dust in a google drive, building a strategy that is purpose-driven drives real results in impact and the bottom line. A strategy that is both effective and encapsulates social purpose has to be both actionable and ensure that the sustainability and impact goals are not vanity metrics but rather ones that stem from deeply embedded purpose within the brands mission and vision, and lead to impact beyond financial gains. As brands consider the action and the purpose of their work, here are 6 steps or levers that can aid in the process of building a social purpose strategy. Strategy is strategy, so its no surprise that these could be applied across various types of organizations and projects, and tailored to your specific needs.
Image courtesy Dstudio Bcn via @Unsplash
Embedded Purpose
How does purpose show up at the core of a brand? This is a great way to evaluate whether the social and sustainable purpose is in fact a piece of the brand's existence or consideration versus a marketing strategy or program to stay relevant. Can sustainability and/or social purpose be clearly pinpointed in the mission including the missions statement, vision, brand story, or values? If the answer is no - it may be time to reevaluate what parts of sustainability are key to the brand and why, and ultimately how they can be incorporated into the core of the company. Tools such as the B Corp Assessment and Conscious Brand Assessment are great starting points to evaluate a brand’s sustainability motivations, identify gaps, and highlight opportunities for focus.
The Why Behind the Impact Goal
As with any strategy, goals are an essential component of building a good strategy that is actionable. That is no different for a social purpose strategy that includes impact goals. Setting ‘SMART’ Impact goals that align with the brand’s business goals is an essential part of any strategy small or large. The impact goals your company sets out to achieve need to be clear not only from a metrics lens but encompass the why or reason for following the impact goal in the first place and the outcomes associated with the achievement of the goal. Often working through a Theory of Change or identifying which UN Sustainability Goals your brand is focusing on can enable a deeper exploration of the why behind the impact goals a brand seeks to achieve and can align a brand strategy and teams around a common language for sustainable and social purpose. Brands have to also recognize that measuring impact can be a much trickier task than measuring sales metrics or marketing performance and setting out a clear path of why, how, when, what, and for whom for each is an essential step in making an impact goal meaningful and achievable as a brand.
Timelines
And no we don’t mean just deadlines. We are talking timelines for each piece of the puzzle that make up the holistic social purpose strategy, and the actions that will put it into effect. These have to include associated cadence of check-ins, meetings, reviews, and measurement methodologies that are trackable and reportable at the same time considering the long-term realities of impact goals and impact measurement (or lack thereof). Without proper timelines for the work to be done, it can feel like we are running in the dark. Regular Check-ins and meetings provide a team or teams continuous focus on the goals and priorities throughout the year, methodologies such as OKRs (Objective and Key Results) can be a powerful system to keep that social purpose strategy on track. We know where we need to get to but don't have a clear path to get there. Timelines are an essential part of social purpose strategy work, as they help us navigate the roadmap with clear checks and balances.
Accountability Loop
While timelines help us navigate, accountability loops enable us to stay accountable to the goals we have set. Often strategy is set and only reviewed annually without any accountability settings. Making it very difficult to catch ourselves when we are off track or clearly communicate strategic goals, outcomes, and tasks internally and externally. On an organizational and team level this leads to disengagement, lost information, confusion, and an inability to reach the goals that were set. Part of the accountability includes answering questions such as Who is responsible for leading the entire strategic process and who is ultimately responsible for the overarching results? Who is responsible for the task and who is responsible for the final outcome? What will happen if a goal is not met? What will happen if we know a goal can not be met or is off-track completely? Do we have a process to pursue a plan B? What is our decision-making matrix around our strategic goals and delivery of the outcomes? The first step is to determine whether your company can answer these questions in the context of your social purpose strategy then create a consistent loop across the goals within your social purpose strategy that can be easily understood across your organization and in particular that are responsible for the delivery of the strategy.
Context of strategy
If we live in a vacuum any strategy would be perfectly executed but we live in a world where change, global events, and sudden pivots can be a norm versus an anomaly. This won't be a revolutionary new idea but thinking through and stating what context the strategy is being written in can actually amplify a companies ability to execute in times of change or unpredictability. A good exercise as your business embarks on setting a new strategy is to note down the context within which the business exists. What part of the lifecycle are you in - startup, maturity, growth? What are the internal factors that could influence your strategic work - new accreditations, staffing changes, funding changes? What are the external factors that could influence strategy - think political, economic, social, technological (PEST) and don't underestimate environmental and global events as key influences? These all may seem obvious but it is important not to forget a thorough evaluation of the context in which your strategy will live. Does the social purpose strategy align and make sense within this context? Is it achievable given the context?
People are everything
A strategy is only words on paper, it's the people that make it happen in the real world. No business can forget that. The strategy has to be developed with people in mind, and we don’t mean assigning a name to each task or a goal, but actually involving them in the strategic development process and considering their experiences as they perform throughout the year. After all, they will be the ones executing the social purpose strategy, they need to be part of the conversation in planning out the tasks, timelines, metrics, check-ins, and even the accountability loops. A committed team is a key to meeting your social purpose strategy. Consider some questions as you embark on your purpose strategy process: Are you engaging your people in the various stages of the strategic process? Are you engaging a diverse team and are you providing them all the tools to succeed? Why or why not? How can you actively engage the execution team and how can their collective experience be embedded into the strategic process and the goals themselves? What can you do to ensure that you are cultivating a culture of social impact across your brand and across your diverse teams, in order to execute your social purpose strategy?
Remember any good strategy is a guide for performance and action, and only becomes useful when its used and implemented within the core operations of a business. This is certainly not an exhaustive list of components of building out a comprehensive and meaningful social purpose strategy for a business or organization but they are pieces that we often see as missing in many strategic development processes and conversations, and then ultimately in the strategic plans themselves and the execution of them. The list of 6 areas is a good starting point for planning and evaluation as companies embark on the strategic planning process, and it certainly provides a brand with important questions to ask oneself instead of going into the process blindly. We will leave you with this thought - a fundamental part of the Social Purpose Strategy is that social purpose, impact, sustainability are deeply embedded into the fabric of a brand and its operations - that means it can be visible in HR policies and corporate cultural norms just as much as its visible on a website or its products. Don't stop because you don't have it figured out completely yet, it's a process and every brand, even those that are best in class social purpose brands continue to grow and evolve and do better. It's a journey, not a destination.
