Intro

Originally launched in 2016, Impact Garden, an online knowledge and resource sharing platform about sustainability and impact, was due for a refresh. Impact Garden was the inspiration of TIIME, an advocacy, advisory and education provider focused on impact investing, sustainability and diversity lenses supporting business and finance on their journey towards the #impactimperative. Impact and sustainability catalyst, Hedda Pahlson-Moller is both one of TIIME’s Founders and the CEO. Hedda and Cécile Sevrain, Tiime’s Partner & Head of Impact Measurement and Management, co-led on this initiative.

Issue

Hedda had identified the need for rebooting the Impact Garden. However, she was struggling to find the necessary resource or bandwidth within her team to take this forward as an additional commitment on top of their already busy schedules. In response to a personal recommendation from a Be The Difference client, Hedda engaged our services to progress Impact Garden’s reboot. 

Solution

Annie Moon, our Founder and a qualified and experienced community development worker and project manager, took the lead, leaning towards a community development methodology and drawing upon her extensive volunteer management skills.

In partnership with Tiime , the Impact Garden reboot blossomed into a digital community development project, including the following:

• recruiting volunteers as contributors to join the section leads for developing content

• setting up an operational framework to support the programme

• sourcing a web developer to build a new website to host the Impact Garden resource

Impact

Creating a unique free-to-access digital portal into the world of impact and sustainability - this drew together a diverse range of high quality sources pulled from multiple places focusing on the following thematic areas:

• sustainability | impact

• responsible business

• sustainable finance | impact investing

• social innovation and social entrepreneurship

• my impact journey

• key players

As a resource, it’s equally relevant to people at all stages of their impact journey.

The team of contributors – Hedda prioritised the contributors’ experience, keen to ensure that they were able to gain deep learnings and insights from being involved in the process.  From the outset, a diverse team was sought, drawn from around the world, with particular attention being paid to redressing the gender balance when it was observed that there were many more women on the team. 

Volunteer contributors were encouraged to follow their passions and interests in terms of their input and so could move flexibility between the different thematic areas.  The team was a mix of people at all stages of their sustainability and impact journey.  This meant that this was a superb opportunity for those newer to the field to, not only increase their subject expertise, but also build networks with and learn from those with more experience.

Learning & Challenges

Flexible volunteering – One reason that the Impact Garden proved to be so attractive to volunteers was because it offered a truly flexible volunteering option. As well as being delivered remotely, it fitted around each contributor’s other commitments and could be done in bite-sized chunks. For those consultants volunteering with challenging schedules, they became ‘advisory contributors’, meaning that they were invited to have input at strategic points such as reviewing completed sections. Scheduling contact time with a diverse global team spread across multiple time zones also presented challenges.

Volunteer retention – Looking after the volunteer contributors well (known as ‘volunteer care’) promoted a higher level of volunteer retention.  Examples included:

• clear communication channels,

• delegated responsibility to self-organise within their teams,

• the ability to flag and resolve potential issues as early as possible.

Consistent brand voice - It was important to ensure that the end product had a consistent brand voice, ie that it was not evident that it had been authored by many. A final proofing of the document was done by a native English speaker and edited to ensure that it was all in British English, rather than switching between British and American English.

Ecosystem Building

The Impact Garden made a major contribution towards filtering and simplifying access to the numerous high-quality impact and sustainability resources available in multiple different locations on the internet. Stepping into this world can be confusing for those who are new to it, whilst even more experienced and knowledgeable practitioners may appreciate some sign posting.

Additional value was created through building new and strengthening existing networks between the team contributors, all with a shared passion and interest in the impact and sustainability space.

More Info

To discover Impact Garden for yourself, please visit: https://impactgarden.org/

For more info about TIIME, please check out their website: https://www.tiime.org/