Is our work purposeful?

We’ve chosen to be a mission driven business that supports not only nonprofits and foundations, but also progressive private and public sector work.

These are complex sectors to navigate within which it is difficult to be objective or definitive about meaning, purpose, or impact.

As an example, Healthcare is a keen interest of ours: a sector where technology can obviously and significantly move the needle on improving quality and access to underserved communities while reducing costs. On the other hand, Healthcare is full of actors with mixed motives and outcomes. Government, education, transportation, advocacy, charity, financial services, etc. all share common sector characteristics: powerful levers for change, where we’ll continue to see opportunities for us to engage with varied actors and projects.

Who and how are we to judge such complex systems and outcomes?

We want to be authentic when we talk about being a mission driven business.

We’re growing fast and we know that as we grow it’ll become even harder to ensure that our work — what we do and who we do it with — matches what we say and what we value. We want to be authentic when we talk about being a mission driven business, and we’re keenly aware that it’s easy for a service business to “impact wash” its work. Everyone at Exygy wants to do work that actually matters. We want to have real meaning, not manufactured impact. We want to be working with clients and partners to create scalable positive outcomes for humanity.

With this in mind, we are proud to announce our Impact Advisory Board — a group of amazing folks who will help us ensure that there is real purpose and meaning behind our work.

What + Why: Alignment (Impact comes later)

We’re making a careful distinction between “impact” and “alignment.” We want to measure both, but first, our board will help us measure Alignment.

Impact: “is this project making a big difference in the world? How big?”

Alignment: “is this partner/project aligned with our mission?”

We aspire to measure the long-term impact our projects make in the world, but we know we need to do more thinking about the right way to do that. As a first step, we’re focusing on alignment.

Why a Board?

We’re a growing business. We recognize that there’s a temptation for growing business to justify decisions. We recognize that growth can be dangerous (see Seuss, Dr., et al.). A third party will help keep the business honest and accurate — on track for a pursuit of both goodness + biggerin’.

Also, we hope that our board will help us not only to measure Alignment now, but to think about how we can best together measure Impact.

Our board is the “Who” in the “Who and how are we to judge such complex systems and outcomes?”. We’ll be announcing our board members in July, 2015.

How does it work?

It’s pretty simple:

1. Each member of our Impact Advisory Board is committing 1hr per quarter to review a brief description of our newest clients and newest projects and evaluating them on a scale of 1-5, depending on how aligned they are with our mission.
2. Those scores are averaged and rolled up into an aggregate alignment score for Exygy

Wow y’all are geniuses! Is this a perfectly simple idea?

Thanks for the support. This is most definitely not a perfect idea. We learn by doing and by exchanging ideas — we invite your feedback and critique and we’ll post our learnings as we go.

I (or someone I know) would like to offer ideas or support.

Awesome. Comment below or Contact Us.

Onward!

-Zach + Team Exygy