Last week, the Forster team attended the annual Meaningful Business conference in London. With people representing all perspectives of the impact economy attending from impact investors and entrepreneurs to progressive business leaders – it was a stimulating day focused on collaboration, problem solving and the future of the sector.
Panel discussions were replaced with practical discussions and insight sharing, with Forster running a co-creation workshop to explore how to communicate impact more effectively and in a way that resonates with critical audiences.
The result was a day of high energy and genuine connections – and a reminder of the importance of taking time to talk, listen and share.
Here are a few of the takeaways:
- The UK has a thriving impact economy and we need to talk it up – NPC’s Impact UK report has valued it at 15% of UK GDP or £428 billion. See the full report here.
- The cross-sector nature of the impact economy is one of its strengths but also requires honest conversations between organisations of different sizes, decision making times and risk appetite. Transparency is key to turning partnerships from painful to progressive and to enabling trusted impact communications. For more on public-private partnerships, see the TRANSFORM playbook here which captures learnings from this global impact accelerator led by Unilever, UK FCDO and EY.
- The bravery of some entrepreneurs, many of who are Meaningful Business award winners, continues to surprise but also shouldn’t be a barrier to offering support. We heard from several incredible people how the ability to tap into advice and share experiences was critical to overcoming challenges of running new or rapidly growing organisations in complex settings. Applications for the MB100 are open until 3 July – apply here.
- The way we talk about impact and entrepreneurship matters. From geopolitics to the transition of deep-rooted systems, we need to keep showing the relevance of new solutions and use the language of today’s economy – resilience, risk reduction, resource efficiency and value creation. There’s more on this topic from an Impact Europe discussion we ran six months ago here.
- And we need to actively involve the people on the front line. From enabling them to create solutions that they can lead to involving them as equals in communications. Learn more about our advocacy approach here.