An Economic Impact that is Unique

By now, nearly everyone in Supplier Diversity has heard of an “Economic Impact”. This is with good reason. Everyone is looking for a good data about how their Supplier Diversity program is positively impacting the company and diverse communities.

But as time goes on, just providing your stakeholders a few unprovable estimated numbers on jobs and “impact” doesn’t cut it. If you give out data on impact, you’ve got to be able to back it up. Moreover, numbers quickly become stale and uninteresting. You need more than numbers: you need a story. People look at numbers but read stories. See the difference?

So a company in the Billion Dollar Roundtable came to us to see how we could use Proximo’s Proveedor platform to do something very different. Proveedor is unique in the way it collects data from your suppliers and gives you innovative insights into what your company’s program is doing in terms of impact. Our qualitative research component was what drew this client to us. They wanted data but wanted to identify and tell “success stories” - suppliers that, through their relationship with this company, had experienced growth and expansion in a way that would resonate with internal and external stakeholders.

Our analysis, completed in a little over a month, quickly uncovered these stories and portrayed them in a compelling way. And this is where things start to get interesting. This is a jumping off point to further dive into a set of long-time diverse suppliers, to track the arc of their growth over many years and identify themes about their success. Now that’s a story to tell…and maybe one that will teach you how to replicate success.