This week Venturebeam, a VentureWave company, launched a proprietary ‘Venture Impact Score’, a free tool to help venture-backed companies determine and share their global impact.
Simply put, the Venture Impact Score helps entrepreneurs and management teams to examine, assess and improve their impact aspirations in line with the UN 17 sustainable development goals (SDG’s).
The Score is designed around Venturebeam’s proprietary impact methodology, refined with input from global impact leaders. At its core, the approach focuses on your venture’s global impact on both people and the Planet.
I contacted Oli Harris, managing director at Venturebeam, to find out more.
According to Harris, the nature of the firm’s impact investments is focused on Series A and B funding rounds, which means a lot of time is spent looking at spreadsheets and financial documentation.
“It was imperative that we didn't just base everything off the spreadsheet because how could we determine that the company that says it's going to do X is actually going to do it and not achieve Y instead?
We had to rate the companies on their business and their impact.
And as we refined and tested it, we tweaked and worked on it.”
Every company Venturebeam has evaluated this year for investment has gone through the scoring process — over 75 companies.
The scoring applies to all venture-backed companies, regardless of their stage, early or late, revenue or IPO status, with Harris noting,
“We believe that the impact element falls with the founding team as the people that are driving the impact.”
“Whether as direct impact-driven companies or regular venture companies measuring their daily operations footprint, we believe every company should have impact goals. Our impact scoring helps companies get their impact compass right and enables investors to validate the venture impact within their portfolio.”
Harris describes the Venture Impact Score as a softer version of existing tools like ESG rating tools:
“If companies used the tool every quarter, they could look at their score and see if they're improving. It might be as simple as enacting a diversity or inclusion policy or offering transport alternatives to staff besides car travel.”
As a company, Venturebeam frames its work under two trees — people and the Planet. To save the Planet, it sets biodiversity and climate change as top goals. For People, its objectives include human rights, diversity, and inclusion.
While Venturebeam’s efforts are arguably softer than other initiatives, Harris makes the point that small behaviour changes, from recycling correctly to switching off lights at night, lead to lasting effects.
However, with overarching goals like zero hunger and clean energy, it is hard in the first instance to see how companies can break these down into actionable commitments, but Harris shared when we were coming up with the methodology, it didn't take us a genius to work out that we needed to live this ourselves.
“One of the things we discovered about those big societal issues is that we don’t have a volunteering policy that allows staff a set number of days to volunteer on projects that are important to them and align with the goals.”
In response, a policy was published, and staff have been active volunteers for a range of causes, including working to end homelessness and back-to-work schemes for veterans.
The Score has attracted strong interest from founders and investors. According to Harris:
”The biggest surprise has been how willing founders have been to take the feedback because they get a score, and we provide feedback with every score saying what you can do to improve the score in particular areas.
Many have contacted us and said that implementing many of the suggestions happened immediately or post-investment.
And they would share the score with other investors, suppliers, or customers to say, ‘Look, we are making a difference here’.”
From there, many share the tool amongst their networks and also share their score publicly.
Harris notes that in terms of follow-up, “it would be great one day if people would post their scores as part of their annual reports.
Future plans for the Score include refining the tools for greater personalisation, with scope to embed the reporting of the tool in a standardised way so companies could use it for quarterly and annual reports to share their progress.
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