In politics and public affairs, companies are often on the defensive. There is always some new regulation, Industrial Strategy, new government white paper or scandal that you have to respond to. It can often feel like you are always on the back foot. 

You inevitably have to deal with the urgent, but as umpteen business books like to remind us, you can’t just ignore the important and the long term. That means both making arguments about how you think big picture policy should look – but also occasionally taking the time to highlight and, if you can, quantify the positive value your company or organisation creates. If you don’t do that, you’re at risk of always just talking about the negative.

How do you do that?

The easiest way to quantify the worth of a company is its stock price. But unless you are a direct shareholder or work on the business desk, this is not particularly interesting – why should I care about your profit margin? More to the point, it leaves out a huge amount of what makes an organisation important: the value it creates for its customers and its workers, its community and even other businesses in the economy. Profit is never a perfect measure of the value created by a business. On one famous estimate by economist William Nordhaus, just 2.2% of the benefits from new innovations are captured by producers rather than consumers.

The next more complicated thing you could try to do is run an economic footprint analysis. 

Pioneered by economist Wassily Leontief, input-output models look to capture not just the economic value created for a company’s shareholders, but its workers and suppliers too – and alongside that, the additional spillover economic demand it creates in a country or community. Leontief won a Nobel prize for his invention, and ever since they have been a core tool for the kind of economic impact reports written by organisations like Public First.

But even this, I’d argue, is not enough to really break out from the noise. Having a big GVA or GDP number is rarely memorable. Politicians and journalists are inundated with numbers: a £X billion gap in the public finances here, potential for growth of Y% there, or record inflation of Z. The figures that stick are those that feed into a story, or the political debate of the day. If we are all arguing about how to find £50 billion of cuts or tax rises, then that number might just about lodge itself temporarily in your memory – but few else will. Many economic impact reports make this even worse, by surrounding the big number with economist jargon and endless other numbers out of context.

All too often organisations seek to balance and break up a dry report by spotlighting their CSR programs and what they are doing to support their community. This is unlikely, however, to make you stand out: today, it is basically priced in that large organisations should give back something. What people really pay attention to is the impact of your core business and how you operate that, not whatever you might do on the side.

It’s not that having a number is wrong – we’ve produced plenty of them ourselves – but that they work best when you marry them to a narrative, and even better when you focus on what makes you unique. Humans remember stories, not digits. What is the story that only your organisation can tell? Once you have that, what is the best way to illustrate it? Yes, model a number if you can – but also ask the public what they think through polling data, or see if you can bring it to life in a completely different way, such as through video or an interactive dashboard.

In the last few years, this is the approach we’ve tried to follow with our impact reports:

• for Google in the UK, we found that the search engine was so important to day to day life that the average person would rather give up an hour’s sleep than a search engine. We then went on to work with them in over 20 other countries, looking at the economic and social impact of Google.
• for Uber, we wanted to know if riders saw it as just another taxi company, or whether it had fundamentally changed mobility within cities. We’ve now worked with them in over 10 markets – from Canada to Sri Lanka, Australia to Brazil – and in practically all of them, riders have told us that the arrival of ride sharing is the change that has made the biggest difference to their transport experience in the last ten years. 
• for the Post Office, we looked at its role as an anchor for the high street – and how much people valued having one close by. We found that visits to the Post Office helped drive another 400 million visits to other shops, restaurants and local businesses, while on average people told us that having a Post Office on their high street was more important than a local pub, library or gym.

Trying to come up with a story for your organisation is not easy – but if you want your message to really stand out, we think its crucial. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can see other examples of our work here – or just reach out to me directly here.