With no fixed scorecard for social impact reports, companies are coming up with their own metrics of meaning to guide and measure their impact on communities, customers, and corporate partners. -By Donna Chan

As a pioneer in enthusiasm for social impact reporting, one might think Canada would have a fixed scorecard all businesses and service organizations could follow. While individual sectors have advanced frameworks, such as the Common Approach for social purpose groups, incredible variation remains. This variation is partially attributable to gaps in data, with some 41% of firms claiming poor data holds them back from achieving their ESG goals, according to a 2023 study from IBM’s Institute for Business Value. However, despite data collection and analytics challenges, innovative Canadian companies are moving forward with measuring and reporting their social impact. They are looking at immediate community impact as well as full supply chain impact. They consider employee wellbeing, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and end user impacts. Above all, they center the value of social impact metrics and strive to make progress.

Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE): Turning High Security into High Impact

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is responsible for Canada’s cryptologic security and foreign signals intelligence. Based in Ontario, the CSE serves the government and the general public as the primary protector of national privacy. From its roots in code breaking in WWII, it continues to be a serious organization with a serious mandate.

However, while much of the CSE’s work is strictly behind the scenes, the agency has recently been very public about its intentions to monitor and shift its social impact. Their “One CSE” is a framework that sets up a public commitment for equity, diversity, and inclusion and lays out what types of metrics matter for the group. Element 4 of the framework specifically links to the agency’s core work as a data science and data-driven entity and describes how the agency’s unique relationship with data, privacy, and security will shape it’s potential impact.

In particular, the CSE notes that timely and transparent data is one of the biggest requests it receives from internal affiliated groups and partner agencies. The agency can disaggregate certain types of data to help pinpoint and breakdown barriers for hiring, promotion, and career development. Conversely, the insights it receives from aggregated data about Canadians and government interactions can help advance representation and integration initiatives. By building out its formal “One CSE” framework for when and how it will collect, reveal, value, and share impact data, the group hopes to meet its own 2030 goals and support other agencies in doing the same.

Intact Financial Corporation: Making Community Relationships Central to Ongoing Success

Intant Financial Corporation, now Canada’s largest provider of property and casualty insurance, traces its history back to an 1809 mutual aid society in Halifax. Social impact has been a part of its ethos since the beginning, but putting formal metrics on its community relationships is a more recent phenomenon. However, once the company started doing formal measurements, it had more guidance about where and how to invest its time, resources, and staff to improve community relationships.

Intact keeps a scorecard that is centered on three objectives. They are having customers as advocates, having highly engaged employees, and being one of the world’s most respected company. Within each of those objectives, multiple social impact and governance metrics are collected to make the objective more specific and measurable. For example, having customers as advocates is quantified as have three out of four customers willing to promote or recommend the company. These metrics are considered as a part of – rather than something adjacent to – the company’s core strategic objectives.

For the most recent year, Intact achieved some metrics but fell short on others. It was a 2023 Kincentric Top Employer in Canada but only 71% of customers were willing to be company advocates after their experiences dealing with the firm. As a result, the company is investing more in the customer-facing experience and burnishing online and virtual points of contact to ensure the communities they serve are happy to engage with them. This has meant more investment in the Intact Lab for automating certain purchase and claims processes and a greater investment in community resilience programs to help customers respond well to climate and weather disruptions related events. By doing these things, the firm hopes to boost its customer advocacy score by also helping the company be more ready for the future with automations and detailed carbon impact measures.

Impact ON: Building Skills in Social Measurement to Level Up and Accelerate Others

For Impact ON, social impact measurement and reporting is central to holding itself accountable and allowing its partners to stretch their own limits. The non-profit social enterprise supports mission- and impact-driven businesses throughout Ontario, meaning it needs to both exemplify how things should be done and help others raise their reporting standards in a gentle and easy to follow way.

To build skills itself, Impact ON first needed to build awareness of all the available frameworks. The group studied the Common Approach to Impact Measurement, the UN’s SDG Impact Standards, the Canadian Indicator Framework for the Sustainable Development Goals, and the SDG Action Manager developed by B Lab and the United Nations Global Compact. This helped Impact ON see what was valued globally and how to localize those metrics in a meaningful way.

As a result, Impact ON built a robust social impact measurement tool it can use internally and also share for other organizations to use. Along with the tool, the group now provides measurement training and grounding in the philosophies of advanced social metrics tracking. This is helping with the current iteration of the dashboard and with a planned update to be released in 2025 based on key lessons learned.

Concluding Thoughts

Each organization approaches social impact measurements in its own way, but all are committed to making these metrics an important part of the conversation. By considering near-term and long-term community impacts and the context of social impact with regard to other employee wellbeing, diversity, and inclusion initiatives, they can make social impact metrics into useful tools for forward progress now, through the milestone of 2030, and for many years beyond.