Final point that our future rankings of companies on SDG contribution will start from an assumption that there are things all companies should be doing (like human rights due diligence, eradicating forced labour etc) before being assessed or given credit for their ‘positive’ social impact.
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Thanks everyone for the discussion. I love seeing the importance of positive and negative, intended and unintended consequences continue to surface.
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Really interesting discussion, thanks everyone! Great food for thought, and thanks for all the links. Lots to follow up.
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Thanks to the Business Fights Poverty team for the discussion thread! Litteraly closing words: think holistically 
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Thank you for the opportunity to connect!
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Thank you - this has been a wonderful insight and will allow me to improve a project I am currently working on.
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Great to chat with you all! Thanks to the BFP team!
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Wow - that is one of our most frenetic and most engaged online written discussions to date!
The LIVE portion of the event has attracted: 1,900 people and there are 166 comments here already. Amazing.
So do keep posting your comments and questions over the coming hours and days.
The comments will stay up here so you can come back to them, view and reference.
We will also be doing a summary (if we can do it justice) to share with you and the Business Fights Poverty network.
Thank you again to everyone involved.
Yours
Katie
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Thank you Katie and all panel members for a very constructive and informative session.
My final note here is, if I count how many glossy company reports I threw in the garbage bin, and converted that quantity into monetary value, I would have enough to set up a sustainable livelihood program…Lol! Good metrics says it all!
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Yes! And leverage a network of like-minded people for other suggestions and alternative perspectives. Very useful info today! Can’t wait to bring back these findings to our organization.
Justin - Hello from NYC! I’d love to learn more about what your company does as I’m on the periphery of that with some of my clients. I’d prefer to be full in - perhaps we can speak off of here on Zoom of email separately. Please let me know. Love the work Archipel&Co is doing!! Randy Penn
Do you know of any case studies endorsed by large agribusinesses that reveal details about the change in financial situation for the partners? My work with agribusinesses has shown that none of them want to put much financial detail in a case study. I really don’t understand why. They claim that it may help competitors but then cannot explain how. Lightweight cases don’t help understanding one bit, in face they are another form of window-dressing. So, perhaps there should be some standards about the level of detail provided, as well as the comparability and objectivity of the measurement methods. A little like financial reports that go that little bit further to inform the reader.
I notice the stunning lack of presence in this forum of the social entrepreneurs, i.e. those businesses actively and personally engaged in reducing poverty.
To most of them impact measurement is a tax, an amount taken out of any funding, thereby reducing the amount available to spend on impact. Its a tax paid to expensive consultants, to produce glossy reports, to go to funders (donors or investors), they are rarely meaningful, but don’t have to be - as their purpose is to impress the funders own funders. This impact measurement tax is the one part of a social enterprise that won’t itself be measured, as who would really want to know how much money had to be taken out of creating impact to measure it, instead it will be hidden in the administrative costs, hidden among many of the other expenses that funders both push onto a social enterprise and hate to fund!
A challenge - to any donor in this chat. Please show us your own impact analysis of impact measurement, a measurement of how much impact has been decreased by the diversion of funds away from impact to measuring it, compared to what (little) impact has been improved, an analysis done not by asking the consultants - half of whose job is convincing you of its value - but done by asking social entrepreneurs in away that they don’t feel forced to give you the politically-correct answer in order not to put their funding at risk.
Its not just the direct diversion of funds, its the crushing of innovation - because innovation often requires trying things to find what works - and the crushing of anything designed to scale because its often hard to measure and attribute.