When we get the question about impact, it tends to be about how one can find money in their budget to give away. This is an especially tough feat for start-up’s to first time entrepreneurs who are just trying to prove a concept and make ends meet. So how do we, a small company ourselves, define impact in our work on a daily basis?

Call us biased, but we like to start with our ABCs. 

A is for Accessibility. The higher priced products you provide, the harder it is to sell. Sadly it takes more money to give away money, which led us to working harder to sell our work. I’m sure you can do the math: the more we worked, the less energy we had to give to others, the less energy we had the worse our work got. So we decided to scrap our entire strategy & start again with a focus on Accessibility. We shifted to cutting costs, offering our deliverables at lower rates, which opened up our work to those who needed it most.

B is for Business. This leads us to our next Investment. Our shift in strategy led us to investing in a new type of infrastructure. We turned to time & our own expertise to be the investment, and shifting from our original culture’s infrastructure of “doing good” only being something that is defined by other peoples’ “giving.” We aim to kick the stigma of impact only being able to be integrated with teams working for free & support sustainable concepts that think about the fact that Triple Bottom Line practices include valuing profit as much as people & the planet.

B is also for (Pro) Bono. While this format doesn’t work for every company, and rarely do we suggest it for companies that are less than five years old, we do help businesses integrate this free offering into their service structure. We have proven this opportunity as a leading part of our own Marketing. Curious about it? Ask us!*

C is for Care. Like before, B sets the stage for C. By creating sustainable strategies that integrate profit & people, we’ve integrated our values with our operations to ensure we are investing in every part of the process. By choosing to invest in care, our work makes space for humans to manage chaos with confidence. We ensure our communication strategies include accountability & expectation check-in’s to ensure we are collaborating with others in a healthy manner. We challenge those around us to uphold their own health as much as their services. And we design our deliverables to be based in empathy and education to offer accessible opportunities for all desiring to participate. 

Doing good isn’t about writing a check, its about integrating impact into every opportunity, because investing in your infrastructure is investing in your community’s culture.

* Every year, Form Follows offers Pro Bono services to a minimum of one organization who we believe are going above and beyond for industries struggling with inclusivity. We are currently partnering with two organizations during 2021 & 2022 in the Art & Development Industries in Texas & Oklahoma. If you are interested in utilizing our Pro Bono services in 2023, please reach out to us here.