Last month I attended the Social Impact Summit in Sydney. It's a gathering of people working across purpose-driven organisations, and this year the sessions I attended focused on consortia, data-driven decision-making, and social procurement.
A few things stood out.
On collaboration
One session looked at how organisations work together across sectors. The core tension is that large and small organisations come to partnerships with very different risk tolerances, policies, and expectations, which makes genuine collaboration harder than it looks on paper.
The framing that stuck with me: shared purpose matters more than shared projects. It's easy to co-sign a project without actually aligning on why you're doing it. The sessions drew on Judith Glaser's idea of Level 3 conversations, dialogues built on trust and co-creation rather than transaction. I think about this a lot in my own work.
On measurement
The question that came up in the data session was a good one: how do we stop measurement from becoming the outcome?
It's a real risk. When you're accountable to a metric, you start optimising for the metric rather than the thing the metric was meant to capture. The argument made was that impact measurement needs to be tied to a clear purpose and integrated into how an organisation actually operates, not bolted on at reporting time.
On social procurement
The final session covered social procurement, using spend as a lever for social value. What I found interesting was the emphasis on timing: embedding social impact criteria early in procurement rather than after contracts are already structured.
One speaker described the approach as sustainability by stealth, making the business case first, then integrating social value once you have buy-in.