Impact Manager Novo Nordisk Foundation, Hovedstaden, Denmark
Abstract Information: The Novo Nordisk Foundation has long reported on the societal impact of its philanthropic and commercial activities. As part of its overall communication on the societal impact of the Foundation, we wanted to show the societal impact of the Foundation on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The UN identified 17 key goals to ensure a sustainable future with underlying measurable targets and indicators. The SDGs have been widely adopted and the knowledge of the SDGs have spread into society more broadly thereby providing a good framework to communicate societal impact through a common language and story. The challenge was how to retell societal impact of the Foundation in a known framework while maintaining the integrity of the evaluation, avoiding “SDG washing”, and communicating the impact on the SDGs in an accessible way. Keeping SDG-washing in mind (taking credit for contributing to an SDG with no clear evidence) we identified a limited number of SDGs that the Foundation has a significant and measurable impact on by mapping indicators already in our catalogue on the 17 SDGs, 174 targets, and 231 indicators. Seven key SDGs were identified which we grouped into WHAT the Foundation supports, and HOW the Foundation supports. WHAT the Foundation supports are the main strategic areas that the Foundation funds. HOW the Foundation supports underpins all the Foundation’s activities and its ways of working. The Foundation has invested for many years in collecting data on its societal impact making reporting on the SDGs possible without having to collect additional data from grantees. We built on a strong basis of more than 40 million data points on a variety of indicators spanning the funding process through reporting on activities, outputs, and outcomes of the Foundation’s grants. We identified both indicators we could report on directly as well as indicators we could report on with additional analyses of existing data (e.g. classification of publications based on which SDG they target). A significant challenge was that the SDGs were developed for countries resulting in many targets and indicators not fitting the reality of a Foundation. In certain instances, such as for SDG 13: Climate Action, despite no indicator fitting directly, we can still show a significant impact on the SDG, e.g. by funding the establishment of a research centre focused on carbon capture and have therefore chosen to include these as well. Overall, while we show the Foundation’s impact on the SDGs, we have had to reframe the SDGs as an evaluation framework to fit how Foundations work. Communicating the societal impact through the SDGs was from the beginning meant to communicate societal impact externally to anyone with an interest. To reach as many as possible, we have built an interactive publicly available dashboard with a mix of quantitative and qualitative measures to showcase the identified key indicators. The initial release and future updating of the dashboard is now part of the overall CSR reporting of the Foundation.
Relevance Statement: The theme for this year’s conference is “Storytelling”. We present here a case of reporting on societal impact of a Foundation’s activities in a new but internationally recognised framework, thereby telling the story of societal impact in a new way for the Foundation but through the lens of a common story and language for the wider public thereby reaching a new audiences. The Novo Nordisk Foundation still reports on societal impact using its own well-established model, but this is now supplemented by reporting societal impact via the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). Recognising that societal impact can be communicated in many ways, and that the way the story is told influences who it reaches, multiple approaches may be used simultaneously to reach both a specialised audience and a broader audience. The SDGs were originally developed to ensure global impact on a set of critically identified goals with specific targets and indicators that UN member countries could steer after. During the years due to coordinated communications efforts, the SDGs have entered the public domain and therefore provides a framework in which many are familiar and can recognise without detailed explanation of an evaluation framework. Since the SDGs were developed for countries to steer after, many of the targets and indicators however do not work for Foundations. With this case, we show that it is still possible to show robust reporting on the societal impact within the SDG framework without risking SDG-washing.
