3 Tips to Rebalance your Social Impact Portfolio

Happy New Year #sportsbiz friends!

If evaluating and rebalancing your social impact portfolio is not already part of your January routine, now is a great time to review the performance of all your community events, programs, and initiatives. Here are 3 things I would encourage you to consider as you start the process of weighing changes for the year ahead.

First, understand how you are creating real value through the work that you do. Try to avoid the trap of basing value on how many “things” are being created and executed or how busy your team is. Is the work your team doing making a measurable difference for your organization and the stakeholders you serve? Are your goals aligned to what is most important to the organization? This is a critical question and leads to the next consideration…

How are you capturing, measuring and maximizing that value? We’re all guilty of using vanity metrics when something we’ve worked on or a passion project needs validation. Or simply tracking numbers that feel important, highlight the amount of work we’ve produced, or show how busy we’ve been. Be disciplined and focus on actionable metrics that have a clear and direct impact on your core goals and the broader organizational objectives. Measure what matters or run the risk of wasting valuable time, resources and budget without making meaningful progress towards the things truly driving organizational growth.

The information provided by the first two exercises helps fuel the final consideration which is the performance evaluation of each event, program and initiative. This is often the most challenging part of the process. It’s about making some difficult decisions about efforts that may not be producing the desired results and whether that investment would be better served supporting something else. The silver lining is that it often opens the door to pursuing a new and more impactful project!

Stay ahead of your budget and planning cycle by investing in this process now. It will help break the cycle of making incremental annual improvements and focus on innovative changes. It will also help ensure that new projects aren’t sacrificed at the expense of time-consuming, legacy projects that may not be as impactful as they once were.

Spend the time this winter to get your fan development and community portfolio in better shape. It will be time well spent!