Rethinking

The last year has been a strange one for sustainability consultancies. For a while, the direction was clear: more mandatory disclosure, wider scope, a compliance workload that seemed only to grow. Then the EU's Omnibus package changed the picture. Scope narrowed, timelines slipped, and some clients who were bracing for full CSRD reporting found themselves out of the mandatory net. For a firm whose pipeline was built partly on compliance work, that is worth thinking through ca

Almost every serious evaluation and social value consultancy starts in the same place: a Theory of Change. It maps how activities lead to outcomes and eventually to impact, and it gives a programme its logic. It is, by design, a model of something that unfolds over time. So there is a quiet contradiction in how most consultancies then report against it. The model describes an ongoing process, and the report freezes a single moment of it in a PDF. A Theory of Change assumes th

If you run a social value or evaluation consultancy, your work has never been more commercially relevant to your clients. Social value is now a key factor in public procurement. The SROI study or evaluation you produce is not just a record of what happened. It serves as evidence your client uses to win contracts. It is also evidence a commissioner uses to hold them accountable to their promises. The question worth asking is whether the format you deliver that evidence in is d

Every consultancy that produces reports for a living has had the experience. You deliver something good, rigorous, well argued, hard won, and then very little happens. It gets read by a few people, filed, and rarely acted on. It is tempting to treat this as bad luck, or as someone else's failure to engage. The research on how evidence actually reaches people suggests something more useful: that whether a report lands is largely a function of how it is disseminated, and that

If you run a report-design agency, the demand shift is already in your inbox. Clients who used to want a beautifully designed PDF, and perhaps a print run, increasingly want something digital: a report people can navigate on a screen, explore rather than scroll, and open on a phone. The design world has noticed. The question for an agency is how to meet that demand without turning yourself into a development shop. The shift is real and it is one-directional The move from prin