Optimizing Social Impact in Organizations: Concepts, Levers and Barriers

With the socio-economic change that has taken place over the last years, in addition to an increase in sustainability regulation, stakeholders have gained importance and organizations are more active in relation to generating social impact, but society demands more and better social impact from organizations. The objectives of this paper are to clarify the concepts of impact and social impact optimization, and to detect levers and barriers to help organizations optimize the social impact that they generate. A qualitative approach based on interviews with social impact leaders from organizations with different forms (big companies, small and medium-sized enterprises, corporate foundations, b-corps, community foundations, public and private foundations, associations and investing firms) is applied, together with focus groups with stakeholders from those organizations that are best practices.

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