How do you track the impact of your business on society and the environment?

Your impact vision needs to be aligned with your revenue - ie how you will make money. If these diverge, you will inevitably find yourself torn at some point in a trade off between impact and revenue. This is the fate of a lot of 'BOGO' buy-one-give-one enterprises that try to divert some of their profits to impact. The impact needs to come from the core reason and service you're delivering.

If you are just starting out - I'd suggest never more than one metric. When I first started investing in mission focused businesses, we asked founders to try to track the top three metrics. But when you're starting out you have 10,000 things to do - and anything that isn't helping you build the business is getting in the way. So, strip it back to one key metric - that tightly alines with your revenue and North Star. The more you sell, the more you should move the needle on your chosen metric.

Don't over do this. Especially in the early years. You can spend endless hours creating standalone impact reports - don't. You need a method and a tool that is built into your core process, and your core process should be what drives impact anyway. When you're bigger and have plenty of people and resources, then maybe you create something more extensive. A lot of impact reports are a waste of time - stick to the minimum that makes a difference and gives you valuable insights to move the needle and show the 'return on impact' as easily as possible.

Among the tools, I recommend the BIA (B Impact Assessment) from B Lab. It is available for free, used by more than 200k companies around the world and based on several global standards. For me, the most remarkable feature of this tool is that it adapts to the size, maturity and particularities of the business, helping them to establish a base line and providing an improvement plan. It is a great tool to have an organized approach and guide to impact measurement, considering there are lots of variables and for many companies is a challenge to run the business and measure impact at the same time due to restrictions in time and resources. Another good alternatives are the ISO 26000 (a guide to follow) and Global Compact Self Assessment.

Only if it helps you build your business. Reporting for reporting sake is a waste of time. So how might reporting data help your business? If it is used to... - improve your core product or service, make you more competitive or increase margin or revenue - drive media engagement, PR and help build your brand - drive funder relationships, investor relationships, lender financing - helps you raise more money to scale impact - negotiates better terms with suppliers, partners, government, customers, banks - employee engagement, alignment, retention

Report and communicate your impact is a powerful way to engage with stakeholders and tell the world about your advances and challenges, either to get credibility and support to your impact business model or to ask for help to accelerate the pace of the impact results. There is great material about criteria to follow in terms of reporting structure such as the guides periodically launched by the WBCSD. It is key to identify the best way to pass the message to the stakeholders, connecting with their interests and language and opening the channels for feedback and collaboration. Storytelling is a helpful skill to strengthen

Once you start tracking the economical, social and environmental impact of your business you'll never be the same again. As per our experience at BA+, it has helped us to define our growth strategy, services offering improvement and our reporting style. Since our origins, we dreamed to become a B Corp, and we worked hard to comply with the high requirements to be one. During the process, you can identify lots of opportunities and make some hard choices on behalf of being more effective, attractive and focused to demonstrate yourselves and the market your business is an impact one.

Measuring and sharing the impact of your business is a great way to get the social proof that is so relevant in today's businesses. When you are successful sharing reliable information about it, you immediately start to shine! By shining it is easier to get spotted by stakeholders that may share your values and find exciting opportunities to innovate, to continuing impacting positively and finally to thrive!

Stakeholder engagement - you have an impact on *someone*. Part of the first steps is defining *who* you have an impact on and then understanding what is important to that *who*. For this, you need to meet and engage them and translate their needs into business requirements. Some desired impacts might have negative consequences for communities if they are not appropriately and sufficiently engaged.