While Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Create Shared Value (CSV) can help strengthen the brand perception, theres is a trend toward meaningful differentiation that is more deeply embedded across business practices and operations.
Inspired by the ambitions of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), customers are developing an increasing appetite for purpose-driven brand engagement. In addition, company employees are demanding deeper commitments to social, ethical and environmental responsibilities from the organisations they work for. Shareholders and business leaders are recognising the advantage of organisations who can lead and generate credible sources of social value without undermining commercial viability.
Our ‘Design for Impact’ program is designed to create and leverage advantage by connecting social enterprises and NGO’s with community networks and corporate clients for social innovation and change. Using a human-centric problem solving approach called ‘Design Thinking’, the program helps to surface untapped sources of opportunity for corporations to show leadership and generate additional sources of brand value.
Since 2015, local NGOs and social enterprises such as ImpactHK (homelessness), KELY Support Group (youth), Enrich HK (domestic workers) and Food Made Good HK (food sustainability) have benefitted from the results of the program.
The Design for Impact program creates a safe creative space for business leaders, employees, community members and local NGO’s to discover opportunities that benefit the entire ecosystem. Design Thinking is an evidence-based design process, which draws insight from activities such as ethnographic research and prototyping. These insights are used to systemically co-create measurable social impact.
Design Thinking artefacts:
The Design for Impact program empowers both teams and stakeholders to co-create meaningful social impact and amplify brand value and awareness.
With the homeless situation in Hong Kong, it is really amazing to see people coming together, to think about how to help and care for this community. We work with the homeless directly, and coming here to experience what you do and the effort and heart that goes into it is really amazing!
Jeff Rotmeyer, CEO of ImpactHK
I love the idea of gamification to help raise awareness of the issues. The stakeholder mapping and systems thinking highlighted the complexity of the whole food consumption ecosystem, but exposed more opportunities at the same time - I loved that.
Heidi Spurrell, CEO of Food Made Good
I really hope I will have another chance to join this program, in order to immerse myself in the design thinking process. I am sure it will help businesses and NGO’s alike, to rethink their strategies and approaches in order to better help their audiences and beneficiaries.
Rosanna Yim, Senior Manager Communications and Development, KELY Support Group
