Victor Hijzen

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 carefully, because...

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 things move The...

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 doing it justice....