How to Deliver Positive Social Impact

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To ensure projects deliver real social impact, organizations and their teams need to set clear targets, track progress—and adjust when plans and variables shift.

We host a joint discussion with Karlijn Sibbel, innovation director at Notpla in London, and Grzegorz Wach, refugee employment initiative lead at NESsT in Warsaw. They discuss their work on two of the PMI 2024 Most Influential Projects, detailing the metrics used to track progress and measure positive social impact as well as the challenges teams face when aggregating this data. They also share their biggest lessons learned when it comes to measuring social impact.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Companies around the world are looking to make a difference by working toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. But that comes with challenges—not the least of which is making sure that teams can measure both the impact they’re aiming for and the stakeholder value their projects create. So today, let’s look at how teams are using data-driven storytelling to show how their companies are achieving long-term success on social and environmental initiatives. 

In today’s fast-paced and complex business landscape, project professionals lead the way, delivering value while tackling critical challenges and embracing innovative ways of working. On Projectified®, we bring you insights from the project management community to help you thrive in this evolving world of work through real-world stories and strategies, inspiring you to advance your career and make a positive impact.

This is Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.

PMI’s 2024 list of Most Influential Projects is devoted to initiatives that address UN Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. The list not only shows off the innovation, execution and impact of these efforts, but also highlights how teams can demonstrate the efficacy of their impact through data and metrics. For social impact-minded projects to succeed long-term, quantifying their positive impact is essential. The metrics don’t need to be financial—but they do need to demonstrate that real progress is being made toward reaching the SDGs.

Today, we’re going to talk to people leading two of those projects about how they measure their projects’ positive impact. And, after you finish listening to this episode, check out all of the 2024 Most Influential Projects. Visit pmi.org/podcast and click on the transcript for this episode. You’ll find a link to the full list along with resources on social impact.

Okay, on to the discussion. Karlijn Sibbel is the innovation director at Notpla in London, an organization dedicated to replacing traditional plastic products with alternatives made from materials including seaweed. The company is making impressive progress—to date, Notpla has replaced more than 17 million single-use plastic units with its natural and biodegradable packaging. 

Our other guest is Greg Wach. He’s the refugee employment initiative lead at nonprofit NESsT and joins us from Warsaw. The work he oversees is part of retail giant Ikea’s larger efforts to support thousands of refugees and was launched by Ikea Social Entrepreneurship, NESsT and the Cisco Foundation. Through the program, NESsT offers financial and business assistance to companies that provide refugees with long-term employment support, such as career training and quality job opportunities.

MUSICAL TRANSITION 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Karlijn, Greg, thanks for joining us. I want to start by learning more about your projects, so let’s begin with seaweed. Karlijn, tell us what you’re doing at Notpla and your projects’ impact. 

KARLIJN SIBBEL
We’re on a mission to make single-use plastic packaging disappear. And what we’re trying to do is to match better the time that you’re using a packaging for with how long actually the material packaging’s going to last. If you look at plastics, it’s going to take hundreds of years to actually disappear or biodegrade, and you might use [that] packaging only for a few minutes. We do that by making packaging from seaweed and plants, and we’re using seaweed because it’s one of the ocean’s superpowers. Some of the species can even grow up to one meter per day. 

We make all sorts of packaging, mainly for short-use applications like takeaway food containers. We make a paper barrier coating. We make flexible films, for example, for dishwasher tablets that can solubilize. We also make rigid materials such as ice cream spoons. And then we use different parts of the seaweed, mainly the polymers in the seaweed, to make these packaging applications. We want to use every part of the seaweed, so we also use some of the fibers that come from the seaweed to make ocean paper. 

Some of the SDGs that we’re targeting are mainly around number 12, sustainable consumption and production patterns, so really looking at not developing harmful materials and replacing plastic. And, of course, by using seaweed, we’re looking at number 14 for life below water. So, on one end, avoid the impact of plastics on our oceans, but also, by using actually marine resources in a way that can actually benefit also ocean health, and building that in sustainable ways.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Cool. I love the idea that part of the solution to healing the ocean of plastic comes from the ocean. How did you arrive at the specific applications or products to bring to market? Did that change over time as you began developing and testing? This is definitely an innovation director question.

KARLIJN SIBBEL
When I was talking about making materials more aligned with how long you actually use a packaging, we were actually quite inspired by fruit and how fruit peels are almost a perfect way of packaging invented by nature. And then we started to look at materials that could be similar like that. And we started to look at spherification, and that’s a process that is used to make fake caviar. Rodrigo and Pierre, the co-founders of Notpla, they were at the Imperial university [Imperial College London], and they were playing around in the kitchen with this spherification and found a new way actually to package liquids. And that’s how our flagship product was born, called Ooho, which is named after the sound that people make when they consume it because it’s actually an edible water bubble. 

So we started to hand those out at the [2019] London Marathon to hydrate the runners. And then we started different partnerships. We started to work with Just Eat, which is a food delivery platform in the UK but also in other parts of Europe. They came to us with this problem of, “Oh, besides ketchup sachets and condiment sachets, we also have a problem with our boxes because often when you have a paper packaging, actually for it to be able to hold food, there needs to be a plastic coating on the inside. Could you use your seaweed technology for that as well?” It’s very much a collaborative approach with what people are asking for and what packaging problems they have and looking together: What could be a solution and how can we use the superpowers of seaweed to address that?

STEVE HENDERSHOT
That’s great. Okay, Greg, we’re turning it over to you. Tell us about the Refugee Employment Initiative.

GREG WACH
NESsT generally is investing into creating quality jobs in Central Europe and also in South America already for over 25 years. The project that I’m honored to lead [is] the NESsT Refugee Employment Initiative, which aims to empower refugees and migrants to access quality jobs with stable incomes. This project started just after [the] outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine in mid-2022. Our long-term aim is the project creates between 2,000 and 3,000 quality jobs for refugees and migrants and improves the lives of at least 5,000 refugees by supporting social enterprises and other impactful companies to create those jobs.

As of mid-this year, we are currently supporting 11 companies. During that time span, our portfolio [is] already supported by skills development trainings [for] over 4,600 excluded people, creating 1,900 jobs, out of which 815 are jobs for refugees. We are targeting social enterprises, so they are generally micro-companies. Some of them are small ones, so having still limited capacity to create jobs internally. They are doing a lot of work in terms of reskilling, upskilling people, equipping them with capacities to help them access decent jobs in the market. This dignified employment is a key thing for us. It’s our DNA, and that’s the most important thing that we are tracking across this initiative, this project, but also across the others that we are running here in Central Europe or in South America.

Using multiple metrics to track progress and measure a project’s social impact

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Okay, great. I heard a lot of end-result metrics in there. I imagine there are probably also others you’re using to quantify your incremental progress, like setting targets for people participating in trainings, receiving certifications, and so forth. What other metrics are you using to measure progress?

GREG WACH
I tried to limit myself not to overwhelm you with all the numbers. Really, we are trying to measure a lot of things when it comes to the social impact. And all of this starts with the theory of change that we created and is driving all our efforts related to supporting job creation. What we are tracking are different dimensions that are included in job readiness—tracking the number of people that are receiving wraparound services, which are, for example but not limited to, psychological, legal support, giving more access to affordable housing or helping vulnerable people [and] children to access schooling on a primary level or to kindergartens. Then, as a next level, is the skills development training, which could be soft skills or hard skills—everything that could help people access jobs, including language courses, which are, especially for refugees [and] migrants, essential. 

And then as a final step, it’s tracking employment in three models that we have defined in our methodology. The first one is most straightforward—simply creating jobs, hiring people internally by the companies that we are supporting. Which, of course, us working with social enterprises has its limits. As a result, we are also encouraging and working with our companies to track their indirect impact, which comes with training and placement—so equipping people with skills, other support which is job-related—and then track, to some extent, whether [refugees or migrants] get a job thanks to this upskilling and monitoring conditions of this work, including salaries, et cetera. And last but not least, the third model is a supplier model one, which is not about getting a job but about purchasing products or services from people with vulnerable backgrounds and giving them a dignified income for their products. We are also measuring gender equality when it comes to pay gaps. We are also measuring business performance of the companies that we are investing in and their environmental practices and impact in order to help them become more and more sustainable.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
That was a great breakdown. Okay, Karlijn, let’s turn to the metrics you’re tracking. How did you decide how to measure your environmental and social impact—and then how did you do it?

KARLIJN SIBBEL 
Metrics are really about, how do we capture and how do we measure success? What does success look like for us? That we can replace as many single-use plastic items as possible. So that’s really our core metric that we use. And we came to the unit specifically because we have so many different types of packaging, and there’s different weights. So it was, of course, thinking of, “Oh, is it better to have a volume as your metric?” But in our case, it makes much more sense to have a unit actually as our key metric.

And then there’s other ways of how we measure impact, as well—using life cycle analysis and understanding of what actually the CO2 footprints are from the materials and solutions that we’re developing, but also looking at end of life. We want to make packaging disappear, so we need to make sure that wherever it ends up—if it’s in recycling or if it’s in different composting methods or if it actually ends up by accident in the environment—that it doesn’t cause any harm. So we do quite a lot of testing to see how does actually the material break down and making sure that it doesn’t leave any harmful traces behind.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Units make sense, then, because you’re essentially saying that every unit that you put into the market, you are replacing one that doesn’t biodegrade as well. So therefore, there’s an impact. The second one also seems really important, which is making sure that your products have the positive effect that you want. How did you figure out how to track that progress? Like, how did you arrive at those tests, and so forth?

KARLIJN SIBBEL 
So it’s something that we’re continuously developing. There are some standardized processes that are being put into place of how to do a life cycle assessment, for example. But it is kind of tricky sometimes, and especially for life cycle assessments, we have different products at different stages of development. Looking at the footprint, at what the processing looks like, is very different at a small scale than at a bigger scale, and the partners you might work with [are] very different. So it’s continually changing, but it’s like this hotspot analysis that we keep doing at different stages of a product’s, I guess, growing-up stages. 

In terms of end-of-life, that’s quite a lot of different tests, because you could think of a lot of ways of where the packaging could end up. We’re always targeting specific ones, so most of the time we want to at least make sure that it can be composted naturally. And there’s different types of ways of composting. So, one of the quick things that we do is we have a little wormery in our office. So that’s the first thing that we test, is like, do the worms eat it? Will it actually degrade, and what is the timeframe in which that happens? But then there’s also external testing that can be done, like home composting tests. And then we send it to the lab, and they come back with how quickly did it actually degrade, and what it degraded into. We know that there are some limitations for these end-of-life verifications. [They are] not always to the standard as we would want them to be, so that’s why we work quite hard on also setting up our own metrics and our own tests of what we think success in those cases would look like, and then work together with partners and different people to see how we can bring that to life outside of Notpla.

Top challenges teams face when measuring social impact

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
What have you found challenging in your particular contexts about measuring positive social or environmental impact in your projects? What is uniquely challenging about this compared to traditional measurements, when the wins and losses are in more conventional and financial terms?

GREG WACH
There are two things that should be underlined here. One is, let’s say second model of creating jobs, which we are internally calling “training and placement.” I mean, there is a lot of challenges when it comes to tracking such impact, because we are including a third party here. People are receiving some kind of capacity-building skills development, and then they are either matched with employers by our portfolio company or are accessing decent jobs on their own using the background and skills that they were given. And then the whole challenge is to track this impact, I mean, to access qualitative and quantitative data and to be in contact with those people over extended periods of time. So that’s one thing—getting this data by our portfolio companies.

And second thing is the scope that we have here in the Refugee Employment Initiative. So we are talking about addressing—of course, on a small-medium scale, but still—a migration crisis and all the uncertainty that comes with it, that the refugee waves [and] inflows are coming and going. People are temporarily at some region, then they are moving, and that whole geopolitical situation is changing. We, right now entering the third year of this project, are constantly adjusting our metrics-related assumptions, the goals that we are designing together with our companies, and also, the qualitative approach in terms of delivering training, in terms of sourcing also people. When I’m looking back and comparing this project with some of the others without the migration label is really challenging. But on the other hand, we truly believe that it is affecting the ecosystem and helping a lot the companies and also the other players to understand how to work within those constraints.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Yeah, that’s great. Karlijn, what have you found most challenging in terms of measuring your impact?

KARLIJN SIBBEL
I think some of the things that are quite challenging are that there’s not necessarily a general standard for things. So when we look at life cycle assessments, for example, there are certain standards that are put in place, but it doesn’t account for everything. And people can choose a bit of what is included and what [is] not. And for example, plastic pollution in the environment is not accounted for, it’s always based on assumptions that the plastic packaging will end up in bins. And so things like leakage in the environment and impact [of] that pollution then on, for example, marine life and potential carbon cycles are not represented. So that can be sometimes quite challenging. It’s like making a fair comparison or looking at the right things as well, making sure that we really take account for the things that we should be taking account for. That’s really important as well, is that we look at the carbon and carbon equivalence of what is emitted and put into the environment. In that case, we need to make sure that we really fully have a holistic view of that.

And I think a similar thing for us counts as well for certification. There are certain certifications like home composting, and there are certain standards of how that testing is done. We believe not always those standards are as high as they could be. We need to adhere to these standards, but we also see some of the limitations that are in that. It can be quite challenging to navigate that.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
What about spreading the word? When you think about working with especially external partners, potential customers, partners and so forth, how have you approached trying to tell the story of what you’re doing, whether that’s sharing metrics or individual, anecdotal human-interest sorts of stories? What role does that play in your overall strategy, and how have you gone about doing it?

GREG WACH
When looking externally to the whole ecosystem, spreading the word in terms of raising awareness about what we are doing, we are running open calls—which on the one hand is a way to secure prospects, but maybe even more importantly, it’s also a way to spread the word about us to the external market. We are also working very closely with other ecosystem players. When it comes to social impact, we truly believe that referrals from qualitative partners is essential to find really good examples, good companies that we could invest in, as not everything is in the books. Part of that’s a given, that we are speaking about metrics, but definitely when it comes to social impact, we need also certain mindsets and a certain approach and [that they are] truly willing to hard work on filling in the gaps in the social impact approach by the leaders. Those are these key things that help us have a qualitative portfolio: hardworking, and on the other hand, to keep this awareness at a high level across the local regional ecosystem.

KARLIJN SIBBEL 
Yeah, I fully agree with Greg in terms of the importance of awareness. I think for us, internally, what we do is starting with educating ourselves, and then using that also to sometimes educate our partners. There’s a lot of different types of solutions out there, and a lot of people are trying to tackle the plastic problem. And there’s a lot of also greenwashing and confusing things out there, so we continue to always educate ourselves and share what we find with partners that we work with.

Working with different companies, what we try to find is real champions at those companies that are also driven by impact and could be a champion internally for driving change and doing that together with us. So I think finding those allies is really important. In the same sense of allies, one of the things in terms of policymaking and how policies can definitely influence things that we’re doing is that policymakers need to be aware that there are some solutions out there, even though we’re relatively small compared to the plastics industry, for example. What we started to do is to create a group of allies, other companies that are in a similar space as us and have similar values as us, which we call the Natural Polymers Group, to share that awareness of, “Okay, we are a group of companies, and you could see us as competitors, but at the same way, we’re also allies all working toward the same mission and same goals.” And being able to share that awareness with policymakers is also quite important.

And of course, we also have a really amazing communication team internally that always keeps thinking about creative ways and engaging ways of sharing what we’re doing and making things clear. That’s also a bit of what I was saying before around the educational piece and how to deal with these complexities. We try to simplify the message and simplify the story so people are engaged—and people understand what is happening and are able to make informed decisions.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Especially in challenging economic times, there can be more scrutiny around SDG-focused projects. How does this increased scrutiny raise the stakes for teams to ensure they deliver on their targets, so the organization continues to prioritize these efforts?

KARLIJN SIBBEL
What is, I think, quite important, and you mentioned it a little bit in the beginning, is that our key metric—of course, we have a lot of different metrics, but our key metrics—around replacing as much single-use plastic units as possible is very much linked to also thriving as a business. In terms of the units sold, it’s directly linked to the units that we’ve replaced. So I think having that linked is very, very helpful in our case.

If you’re able to show [the] progress that you’re making, that’s what we can show through metrics, is how [much] closer we get to our goals and how close we can get to success. But also, we can show, if we’re setting specific metric targets, how good are we at meeting those targets? When the times get tough or if there’s new funding or projects related, there is definitely people looking at those metrics to determine if they will invest more or if they’re happy to support us more or work with us. So I think being able to set good targets and being able to reach those targets, but at the same time being quite ambitious, I think that balancing that out is super important. And having metrics that measure, in our case, double things—of the impact that we’re making but also how well we’re doing as a business in terms of more financially—I think that’s really key.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Greg, how about you?

GREG WACH
When there are hard times in terms of business performance, social impact could be impacted, affected in terms of scale, in terms of quality, depending from company to company. And what we are doing with this is a kind of multi-level strategy which combines, on the one hand, metrics, on the other, diversification. And both things are going hand in hand, in terms of communicating and discussing with potential donors, talking through numbers. I mean showing what kind of impact we are generating thanks to our companies, where we are, what kind of value we are adding, and how it is against the benchmark. I truly believe numbers are illustrative, especially when talking to business.

On the other hand, when looking at the other side of this chain, I mean to the companies in the portfolio, we are always setting them some KPIs (key performance indicators), some goals, of course, defining them together with them and then tracking on a quarterly basis. And then at the annual benchmarking, where they are against the short-term goals and against the long-term goals when it comes especially to social impact, to level of salaries, to number of people trained, or employed or placed. And accordingly, we are adjusting also the investment structures that we are giving them, based on where they are in terms of achieving those goals. So they are incentivized if they are closer to reaching the impact goals, or they have maybe a bit tougher conditions when they are far away or totally not aligned with the impact goals. So I would say that on the one hand, very useful, very supportive for fundraising, using clear and precise metrics. On the other hand, very much supporting the case and the overall portfolio work for the companies when they see goals and clear incentives that comes with achieving or over-performing with the social impact metrics.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
What’s the biggest lesson each of you have learned from your work on these projects, especially when it comes to measuring your impact?

GREG WACH
One key lesson was going outside the bubble, I would say. We usually are working with typical social enterprises, while here in the Refugee Employment Initiative, from the very beginning we made this decision that if we want to have a big impact, a meaningful impact, we need to also work with more traditional businesses—very much profit-oriented, but those that their workforce consisted from a lot of vulnerable people, especially refugees [and] migrants. What we learned throughout is [to speak] very precisely based on numbers and metrics actually with a traditional business, profit-oriented, and teach them to progress into the social impact side when it comes to the job conditions, but more importantly, when it also comes to communicating internally and externally to the world, that they are doing [an] impact job even though they were not calling it in this way previously.

KARLIJN SIBBEL
One thing that we touched on a little bit is that there’s certain benchmarks or metrics that the industry requires, and then there’s the view of what you think as a company or as your mission that you want to work toward. One of the things that [I have] learned is that sometimes it’s okay to not have those same benchmarks, and to find and define those benchmarks a bit more yourself to increase that standard, and then to communicate about that and work with different people that believe in the same values as yourself to see how that can one day become maybe the new standard.

And I think this is maybe also a bit related to Greg what you said—partnerships are really key. One of our values is “better together,” and I think that’s really important, to be outward-facing and working together with brands and finding ways to make it work. And as you said, Greg, it’s not always easy to work with companies that maybe have sometimes a different drive and different agendas and different measures of success, but to find ways to make it work. Because in the end, to make the biggest impact that we can make, we do need to work together, and we do need to work with companies that you might not initially have the same values with, but eventually to turn toward ways to make it work for everybody.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Awesome. Thanks very much.

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