Context
The world’s food system creates enormous volumes of waste and does not adequately feed the global population. Systemic change is needed to ensure the more efficient and sustainable provision of food needed for us all to maintain a nutritious diet. Despite offering great potential to inform and drive these changes, data is hugely under-utilised across the agri-food sector.
Agrimetrics’s Data Marketplace aims to enable better use of data across the agri-food system, and the team are ambitious about the social and environmental value this work can create. So, in Spring 2020 they invited me to help develop an impact strategy that would make it integral to their planning, delivery and reporting.
What we did
- I designed and facilitated a workshop, leading the Executive team through a process to create a ‘Logic Model’. The end result was a framework setting out their vision for a sustainable and resilient agri-food sector powered by data, and the ways their work contributes towards it.
- I worked with the team to embed this Logic Model into Agrimetrics’s annual delivery plan, KPIs and HR framework, encouraging Agrimetrics’s 30+ employees to consider their roles in enabling impact.
Over four years following this initial engagement, I continued working closely with Agrimetrics’s Chief Operating Officer Benjamin Turner to deepen the team’s understanding of and strategy for achieving social impact, through:
- Regular coaching conversations exploring Agrimetrics’s role as a data institution in the agri-food sector.
- Interviewing clients about their data challenges and work with Agrimetrics, and the difference which this has made to them and their stakeholders.
- Contributing impact-related recommendations to bids for contracts and funding.
- Supporting the delivery of projects with Agrimetrics’s clients and partners including Defra and the Open Data Institute. For example facilitating workshops on social impact and co-writing the Food Data Landscape Review.
Outcomes
- Agrimetrics’s focus on social impact during this period has contributed to their success in winning over £10 million worth of contracts and grants, including being selected as a data marketplace provider to multiple UK government bodies.
- An independent economist calculated Agrimetrics’s Gross Value Added (GVA) to the UK economy in 2023 as an estimated £37.4 of value created for every £1 invested.
- Social impact is now embedded in the thinking of key team members, integrated into the company’s strategy, and incorporated into the delivery of client projects and services.
Clients and partners
