Energy Initiative FAQs

You’re right it is! But as with any good product we’ve continued to adapt it a little to try to make it as useful to you as possible. As you know, we’ve listened to over 54,000 customers across 100+ companies in over 30 countries. Through all that listening we’ve learned what kinds of impact customers say matters most to them, and we’ve used this information to design lean data surveys targeting these areas of impact. We hope the data we collect through these surveys is great for you because:

1. You’ll get a sense of how you’re impacting customers across the areas of impact that they say are most important to them. This is why we’ve called it Impact Performance! We hope these indicators support your impact management, and your business growth / portfolio performance more broadly.
2. We believe these indicators will soon become the definitive list of metrics for your sector, meaning that multiple investors will cease to ask you for multiple different metric sets. After all, you’ll be armed with the metrics that matter most (to your customers), and who could argue with that?
3. You’ll get recognition as being at the vanguard of enterprises / funders measuring impact in the most credible way in your sector. That’ll help you with future fund raising.

And we also know that this is a new product of ours. It may not be perfect, and it may not capture everything you know to be true about your impact. That’s in part why we’re offering it at such a discount to our favourite clients. As ever we’d love your feedback through the process so we can continue to learn and adapt our products to serve you with data that brings you closer to your purpose.

Even if some of these questions are familiar, the point of truly great impact measurement is not to do it once and then assume impact will remain unchanged indefinitely. That’d be like measuring your financial accounts, or operational performance once and assuming your revenues or margins were constant. That’d be bonkers right? Well impact is the same, social performance (like financial or operational) changes. Your customers will experience impact differently over time.

Therefore to create maximum impact, measuring the same things again is just as important as measuring them in the first place!

We are looking to sign-up partners with the next three months, and carry out our lean data methodology across your investments/business thereafter. As you know, our lead data approach is extremely robust, but tiem effective and we’ll aim to be as speedy as we always try to be. We anticipate data will be collected within our usual 8-12 week period, and to have enough data collected by Q4 2020, to have an updated report, dashboard and index rankings available by Q3 2023. And to state the obvious, your data will be entirely anonymous, so whether you’re doing brilliantly, or if there might be areas for improvement, you’ll be in control of how that data is shared.

If you want a more customised survey, we are certainly happy to oblige! Unfortunately, we cannot offer the same discount to additional questions. What we can do is offer the Impact Performance section at the discounted rate and then discuss additional pricing, which will depend on the number and complexity of questions you want to add. Let us know if you prefer this and we can have a more detailed discussion.

Yes of course, the impact metrics depend on the sector. Here are the themes and indicators:

Opportunity and Economic Impact

• Income Generation
• Quality of Life
• Spending
• Over-indebtedness

Access

• First Access
• Prior Source
• Access to Alternatives
• Poverty Reach + Inclusivity Ratio

Impact Performance

• Customer Satisfaction (Net Promoter Score ®)
• Challenge Rate
• Issue Resolution
• Customer Service (Customer Effort Score)

Demographics

• Gender
• Location (rural/urban)

We’re still working on the precise final designs, but for a sense take a look at our past benchmarking in our Why Off Grid Energy Matters Report. This report caused quite a stir, even being read by the President of Kenya (he’s a fan, what can we say?!), and we’ve heard multiple times from participating companies that being associated with the report was helpful for their status in the sector.

In terms of length and detail the report will look similar, but a little shorter. As such we hope it’ll be easier for you to consume the data that is most relevant to you. We’ll post a link to a template as soon as it’s ready, so if you’re still keen to see more before starting, then check in here again soon.