Why we wrote The Impactful Business Playbook
Impactful launched just over a year ago, with the mission to support every business to maximise their positive social and environmental impact. This mission was born out of a sense that, collectively, we weren’t moving quickly enough towards a more sustainable and equitable world. We have huge global challenges, the climate crisis and all its cascading implications, recovering from the pandemic and social injustices affecting communities across the globe. However we are trying to overcome these challenges without the contribution of our most numerous and wealthy organisations, businesses have the ability to play a significant role in creating a sustainable and equitable world but they need to act now.
When we started digging into why so many businesses understand why they should take action but so few do it well, we realised that it’s not that easy for businesses to find out what it actually looks like to have more impact and how to make it happen authentically. We heard a lot of talk about purpose and being mission driven, talk of needing to respond to the climate crisis and social justice issues but not a lot of accessible information to help turn talk into action.
The world of social and environmental impact felt complex, time consuming to navigate and often pretty expensive to access expert support.
We realised that to speed up the pace of change, we needed to bring down the barriers to action. To make it easy for business leaders and impact champions to start and start now.
That’s why we’ve written The Impactful Business Playbook: Your guide to maximising social and environmental impact through every part of your business.
‘The Impactful Business Playbook can help every business leader think strategically about how to embed impact within their business. It stands out because it not only inspires you to take action, but is also a practical and jargon-free guide and set of resources. It’s the ideal starting point to develop your organisation’s ambition for positive change and you’ll refer to it again and again as you build and execute your impact strategy.’ — James Teasdale, CEO, Year Here
This is where you can start. If you are passionate about creating social and environmental change and want to know how your business can be an engine for that change, this Playbook is for you.
We’ve spent the last six months researching and writing this holistic guide that introduces you to every part of the impact ecosystem and how that relates to your business. We’ve poured our team’s collective knowledge and experiences into the Playbook. We’ve also spoken to social and environmental impact experts and entrepreneurs, business leaders and impact-minded employees, read reports and research papers and unpacked numerous impact frameworks to unearth the most useful and practical ideas to jump start your impact journey.
In The Impactful Business Playbook you’ll find 70 pages covering:
- How we define impact
- The business case for investing in impact
- Key principles for success
- The seven Impactful Goals — diving into how you can start to take action now
- An introduction to Impact Measurement
- An introduction to Impact Investing
Learn + Act
Each section is designed to help you learn the basics of impact through simple, jargon free language, lots of additional resources and case studies, whilst also connecting our information to things you might have heard of already, like the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
We don’t leave it there though. We’ve jam packed the Playbook with dozens of ‘Things to Consider’, areas where you can act now with practical steps you can start to implement in your business.
“I work for small start-up that is looking to build their business on sustainability as one of their core values, and ‘The Impactful Business Playbook’ gives an excellent frame of reference for starting that journey, from how to consider all stakeholders (and which questions you should ask yourself), to what types of emissions your business produces. This guide is an invaluable resource for any business looking for a roadmap to create positive impact in their sector and beyond.” — Hannah Abdel-Hadi, Impact champion, Consumer Products Startup
Think of this Playbook as an introduction to being an impactful business. There is a lot of information and ideas to digest and each new suggestion might take you on a journey of discovery as you decide how to implement it into your organisation. Progress will be gradual and over time and there will be places where you’ll need more support or specific guidance but this guide will help you understand what the right first steps are for your business.
This Playbook gives you the framework to think about what a truly impactful organisation looks like and dozens of places to dive in depending on what you do, what you and your people care about and where you can have the most impact. Use it to start now and refer back to it frequently as you develop your impact strategy.
Let us know how you get on with it, we’re always interested in feedback, new ideas or just to sit down and discuss any bits you find interesting or challenging. You can email us at hello@impactful.world.
