What we did
Working alongside ClearlySo, a UK based investment bank, we designed and developed a platform for private equity and venture capital investors looking to assess their impact.
The investor’s role is to keep looking for more information, to know as much as you can about your companies and this is a way to think about business with a fresh perspective
The ClearlySo ATLAS platform:
Assesses the social and environmental impact of investor portfolios
Encourages transparency, ensuring future investments are ethical, sustainable and impactful.
Maps the positive and negative impacts of investments, giving investors the power to create more sustainable and valuable businesses.
How we did it
- An in-depth research phase uncovered the attitudes, behaviours and motivations for a range of investors, alongside developing a greater understanding of existing structures and frameworks.
- Through extensive collaboration with ClearlySo, a new, flexible all-encompassing taxonomy for measuring the social and environmental impact of financial investments was produced. Whilst methodologically rigorous and user-driven, the framework was produced to be statistically flexible enough to account for subsequent changes in the impact sphere.
- Clear personas arose from our interviews and testing, and helped to drive the design direction. Understanding the psychology and motivations of internal and external stakeholders provided us with a solid foundation to begin design and development.
- To ensure ClearlySo ATLAS was as simple as possible to use and find results, we used a “thematic compass” with a score for six overall themes. Three of the themes are environmentally focused (climate, resources and ecosystems) and three cover social issues. The themes are also color coded to make it easy to discover what is and isn’t working. For instance, red highlights problems and green shows what’s going well.
- To prevent time-poor investors from feeling overwhelmed with information, we created a summary of three crucial risks and three key opportunities for each company.
This has added a huge amount of value by aligning the interests of different stakeholders, including employees, investors and customers, and creating a framework by which it can be clearly communicated. This has meant that Q-Bot has been able to have an even greater impact than expected and most importantly demonstrate it. It has greatly contributed to the growth of the company and winning of new orders.
The result
- ClearlySo ATLAS helps private equity and venture capital investors to efficiently assess the social and environmental impact of their investments and provides practical suggestions for action.
- The assessment process is streamlined to reduce the client burden of completing the process and inputting data, ensuring each step is as hassle-free as possible.
- Progress reports and a wealth of online resources are available to download anytime, making it easy to set goals and communicate impact information with clients and portfolio companies.
Press
The finished ATLAS platform is receiving great feedback, include a number of features in Forbes magazine.
