Date: Thursday, January 30, 2025
Hello! I’m Laura Budzyna, founder and principal of Beyond Measure and member of the Social Finance TIG leadership team, here to share a glimpse into one of my favorite projects.
Some corporations have a shaky track record when it comes to human rights, and increasingly, their investors are paying attention. Investors may avoid investing in these companies, drop them from their portfolio, or help them improve their practices. Some prioritize human rights on principle, while others do so because human rights controversies are financially risky, especially with the expansion of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) regulations.
How can these investors get timely, reliable information about companies’ human rights performance? Luckily, a handful of watchdog organizations track allegations of corporate human rights abuses in real time. One such organization is developing an API (application programming interface) to deliver corporate human rights data directly to investors’ dashboards.
How might we measure and manage the impact of high quality, seamlessly delivered data? In 2022, I collaborated with this non-profit as a strategy, learning and impact advisor. Our objective: to develop a foundational framework and set of tools for understanding, measuring, and managing the impact of this tool, including (1) design research with potential users, (2) a theory of change, and (3) a results framework to track outcomes.
We first wanted to learn from investors to better understand their challenges. How do they engage with human rights data now? How do they want to use this data? What new decisions or behaviors would this enable?
As we conducted our interviews, two different stories emerged. We decided to borrow from the design field and develop two personas to represent potential users: “Astrid,” — a responsible investor concerned with shifting corporate human rights practices, and “Brendan” — a mainstream investor focused on reducing financial, reputational and regulatory risk.
We explored their goals, needs, frustrations, and use cases. For Astrid, human rights are a top priority for her portfolio and her clients. In Brendan’s case, his goal is to comply with regulations and avoid losses for his clients. While Astrid uses human rights data to inform conversations with companies, Brendan mainly uses it to avoid investing in controversial companies. Astrid is hungry for more depth and detail, while Brendan needs more timely alerts and assurance that no significant risk factors are overlooked.
It quickly became clear that these personas represented two distinct impact pathways. With better human rights data, the Astrids of the world would influence company policies and practices for the better, while the Brendans would shift capital away from poor human rights performers in the long run. These “active” and “passive” impact pathways ultimately formed the basis of our theory of change and our results framework.
The design lens helped us do three additional things:
Have you used design personas in your evaluation work? How did it go?
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