Taanya Khare, Senior Associate, Impact, Acumen

Hi, I'm Taanya. I work within the impact team at Acumen, and my role revolves around setting up the impact measurement and management systems within the company.

In my opinion, impact should be embedded across every aspect of your business plan.

So a general business plan would have a narrative on what the company is doing. Which is the larger mission? What is the operational plan of the company? What is the plan from a futuristic perspective? You can also talk about what is the marginal change that you're creating as a result of your product and services? For example, in the case of a company selling solar lights, I think you are providing energy access or lighting to the different customers. Being able to translate what is your mission objective and then putting an impact thesis to it is the first place, I think, in the business plan that you can talk about it.

Through your business plan, I think one area which you should absolutely highlight, almost as a separate section, is the impact section. Over there, I believe you can talk about, one, how are you creating impact through your business model and the products and services? But also how are you tracking your impact through metrics? How are you driving operations? How are you thinking about being inclusive? What are the social or environmental factors that you've taken into consideration to try to be more sustainable?

We call it an impact measurement and management section within the impact section, which is where you can talk about the frameworks you're using, the kind of metrics you're deriving, what is your theory of change, and the aligned underlying metrics associated with that, and whether you've been able to progress and track that impact as well over time.

Key takeaways 

• Integrate impact into all aspects of your business plan, aligning objectives with desired social or environmental outcomes

• Establish metrics and frameworks to ensure impact efforts drive purposeful, meaningful action