Starting your impact journey: being clear on what matters most
Many organisations want to support communities in a meaningful way but struggle to define a starting point. Aligning social impact goals with business values, gaining internal buy-in and designing something that works across multiple regions can feel complex.
The challenge
Smiths Group, an international engineering company, faced the challenge of uniting its global workforce behind a shared vision for grantmaking. The approach needed to reflect diverse cultures and business practices, while also be adaptable to local needs worldwide.
The outcome
Our impact consultants and grantmakers worked closely with the team at Smiths Group to:
- Define a values-led strategy by understanding core organisational values and incorporating them into the strategy design, enabling global buy-in and adaptability across regions.
- Design a flexible, employee-led model, allowing each operating company to identify local charities aligned to their business and community needs.
- Build a framework for long-term impact, including partnership principles, grant selection criteria, and evaluation tools to support programme growth.
- Deliver a structured, well‑governed grantmaking programme, ensuring the organisation could give with purpose, consistency and confidence across regions.
As the programme evolved, the company captured insights to inform and drive continuous improvements. The result was a global but locally adaptable grantmaking programme that empowered employees, strengthened community partnerships and laid the foundation for sustainable impact.
Advice for starting your impact journey
If defining your starting point feels daunting, our Guide to Impactful Corporate Giving offers simple frameworks to map your purpose, values and priorities.
Building your business case: bringing stakeholders on the journey
Securing internal buy-in for your giving programmes is essential for long-term success. Engaging multiple teams with varied perspectives can be challenging, but having an evidence-based strategy and guidance from independent experts can help bring key stakeholders on board.
The challenge
Halma, a global engineering company operating in over 50 countries , faced the challenge of creating a unified giving vision across teams and deploying significant resources to transformational community projects worldwide. Bringing senior leaders, regional teams, and local stakeholders together behind one coherent approach required a clear, credible and evidence-based strategy.
The outcome
With support from our team, through facilitation and practical tools, Halma brought senior leaders together, conducted interviews across regions to understand local needs and co‑developed a strategic framework that balanced global priorities with local autonomy. The result was a grantmaking programme that reflected global and local priorities, empowered employees worldwide and enabled the business to deploy its resources effectively and consistently.
Advice for building your giving business case:
- Present relevant statistics about why charities and communities need business support. Use sector research and reports to demonstrate the value and urgency of your proposed initiatives.
- Gather insights from both internal and external sources to strengthen your proposal. This could include benchmarking against industry peers or referencing independent studies.
- Share real-world examples of how other organisations have successfully launched and sustained impact programmes. Highlight the strategies and frameworks that enabled their success.
By building a strong business case you can move from ‘is this a priority’ to ‘we can’t afford not to do this’.
Adapting your giving strategy: keeping your programme relevant
As businesses evolve, giving and impact strategies often need to be revisited to stay relevant and effective. Changes such as restructuring, shifting priorities or developments in the external environment can prompt organisations to reassess how their programmes align with current societal needs.
The challenge
A global financial firm needed to reassess its grantmaking programme to reflect today’s evolving social landscape. With changing priorities and evolving community needs, the organisation required a refreshed strategy that could better target its resources and ensure its support remained relevant and effective.
The outcome
Our Impact Accelerator gathered fresh insight into the needs of disadvantaged communities and helped the firm understand what meaningful change looked like in different contexts. By updating its strategy and strengthening its processes, the organisation was able to target its support more effectively and achieve lasting results. The refreshed framework enabled clearer priorities, better alignment across teams and a more focused approach to addressing the needs of the communities they serve.
Advice for adapting your giving strategy
- Pause and reflect: Take time to evaluate whether your current approach is meeting the needs of the communities you aim to support.
- Gather evidence: Engage with experts and stakeholders to understand the root causes of the challenges you want to address. Use data and lived experience to inform your strategy.
- Redefine your framework: Update your goals, criteria for selecting partners and processes for funding to ensure your programme remains targeted and impactful.
- Enable lasting impact: Use insights from evaluation and feedback to refine your approach, ensuring your support creates meaningful change where it’s needed most.
Adapting your impact strategy is a natural part of the journey. By staying evidence-led, engaging with stakeholders and remaining flexible, your organisation can continue to make a positive difference even as circumstances change.
Effectively measuring your impact: knowing what is working
Effectively measuring and accelerating your organisation’s impact requires the right tools and regular monitoring. Without a clear evaluation framework, it can be difficult to know whether your programmes are truly delivering the outcomes you set out to achieve.
The challenge
Skipton Building Society runs a long‑term strategic partnership programme supporting charities across three pillars: improving financial wellbeing, helping people access a home and championing warm, energy‑efficient living . As part of a refreshed giving strategy, Skipton sought a clearer, more consistent way to understand the difference its partners were making. They needed an evaluation framework that could track core metrics across all charities while still allowing partners the flexibility to use measures aligned with its work and existing data systems.
The outcome
Working closely with charity partners, our Impact Accelerator helped Skipton co‑develop a robust evaluation framework grounded in its overarching Theory of Change. Together, we identified a set of common metrics tested across all pillars for relevance and practicality, complemented by a wider menu of optional measures. This blended model enables Skipton to aggregate core data, maintain partner flexibility, strengthen learning through combined quantitative and qualitative insight and support future partners with a transparent, scalable reporting approach. This resulted in an evaluation framework that is rigorous, collaborative and future‑proofed.
Advice for measuring your impact:
- Define the outcomes you are working towards: These should align with your giving strategy or theory of change and be informed by what is needed most.
- Identify what to measure: Identify the key metrics and indicators that matter most to your organisation, stakeholders and giving strategy ambitions. These could include outputs, outcomes and long-term impact .
- Align teams and regions: Aim to create consistent measures across locations or departments. Make the most of data that is already collected by charities or that is available in the sector.
- Use data to inform decisions: Collect and analyse data regularly to track progress, demonstrate results and support continuous learning and improvement.
- Tell your impact story: Use your evaluation framework to communicate the difference your organisation is making, both internally and externally.
A robust evaluation framework not only helps you track and scale your impact but also ensures your efforts remain aligned with your goals and the needs of the communities you support.
Exploring new ways to create impact
If your business is looking for new and creative ways to create meaningful social impact, there are a variety of approaches you can consider. Beyond giving, organisations are increasingly exploring innovative approaches such as social investment , which offers flexible repayable finance to social purpose organisations. Deploying social investment, the purpose of CAF’s own Venturesome Impact Fund, offers a strategic approach to giving, enabling donors to use charitable funds more effectively and recycle them over multiple years.
Another way to make a lasting difference is by supporting the long-term development and resilience of your charity partners. Investing in impact consultancy can help charities strengthen their strategic and operational practices, making them more sustainable and better equipped to meet rising demands.
