Thank you to all of the Net Impacters who participated in October’s Impact at Workshop. We couldn’t have managed without the insights from all of our attendees who tackled dynamic and challenging questions with creativity and inspiration. In the end, we may have come up with more questions than solutions!

Here are a few of the themes which emerged from the evening:

1) The importance (and difficulty) of integrating sustainability policy into business strategy. To maximise on the impact of a sustainability plan, partnerships, community engagement and environmental policy need to be RELEVANT to your business. From a consultancy or NGO perspective this means developing a thorough understanding of the corporates you are working with and adding value in a unique and commercially oriented way.

2) Defining relevance. The importance of internal and external COMMUNICATION to the development of successful sustainability strategy and implementation. In order to produce a clear and coherent sustainability strategy, it is important to actively listen to
your stakeholders. Perhaps not a revolutionary statement, but there was a lot of valuable discussion about the distance between listening and hearing.

3) The difficulty of MEASURING IMPACT. One of the reoccurring themes throughout the evening was about defining impact. There were some really interesting questions about tangible change and influence that came out of considerations of individual positioning.

These are all themes that come up frequently on the sustainability agenda, but it was useful and insightful to talk them through with everyone and stimulate discussion. Thank you so much for participating! We hope to see you again at the November event, and please let us know what you would like to see from us in the future (event format, themes, issues, speakers, etc.)