Vertigo Ventures ImpactTracker™
The Climate Challenge Cup welcomes it’s sponsor, Vertigo Ventures; keeping organisations on track for the SDGs 2030 target since 2014.
Climate Challenge Cup sponsors, Vertigo Ventures, have launched its pioneering impact product, ImpactTracker™, in 2014. ImpactTracker™ is a “one of a kind” cloud solution for capturing, analysing, understanding and demonstrating the social, economic and environmental impact of an individual's or organisation’s activities - beyond academic outputs.
Since then the product has been deployed worldwide to help clients in countries from the UK and the Netherlands to Australia and the Philippines to showcase their impact and embed impact-first thinking into their day-to-day activities. The product’s innovative technological approach continues to be recognised - it is currently a finalist in the Best Digital Project - SME category at the Computing Digital Technology Leaders Awards 2021.
ImpactTracker™ provides an objective series of metrics that are used by many leading universities and research institutions (and a methodology that informs the Times Higher Education (THE)’s Impact Rankings every year). It also enables users to clearly map their activities onto the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and track their progress towards these vital challenges.
With the release of sister product, TrackImpact, in 2021, users can now publish their ImpactTracker™ work into the public domain and attract collaboration. Every single project is shown alongside its target SDGs so funders, industry bodies, policy makers, academics, scientists and more can identify where they can make the most difference and quickly get involved in important activities.
Tracker scales impact activities, by capturing the entire lifecycle of projects in real time, preserving evidence and enabling rapid, automated exporting of work into formats such as presentations, national assessment applications, or world ranking submissions.
Clients can produce more world-class research submissions and secure more funding, while being able to transparently demonstrate sustainability credentials.
Understanding Impact
In an academic context, impact can be defined as the demonstrable change or benefits to the wider society, economy or the environment that arises through research. Beyond academia, understanding and demonstrating the impact of business activities is vital when meeting increasingly stringent Environmental, Social and Governance regulations.
Understanding the real-world positive and negative results of activities, rather than relying on unsubstantiated claims or greenwashing, is crucial to improving how we resolve issues surrounding the climate crisis.
Of course, there are many moving parts in projects that achieve demonstrable change. This makes tracking and planning for impact difficult; for example, constructing a new power plant may have positive social and economic impacts in generating jobs and revenue, but it could have a negative environmental impact. When considering the SDG 2030 target, setting one goal back in order to speed up progress towards another cannot be acceptable.
Sustainable decision-making needs to be informed by holistic data that covers all impact areas, and must be backed up by evidence and measured against objective metrics. Historically these impacts are hard to understand and demonstrate, meaning they are rarely taken into consideration during planning or delivery of projects (or later analysis).
Complex impact, SDGs and ImpactTracker™
ImpactTracker™ has been designed to make the recording, data analysis of complex and interlinked activities and their impact fast and straightforward, tracking any project against every SDG it touches on.
Understanding the relationship between activities and SDGs can inform how best to address particular projects. For example, if we consider SDG 11 - “making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, “ we might investigate the effects of policy on regional development.
Overlooking the impact on minorities when considering certain policy decisions could have detrimental effects on the growth and appeal of a particular region. ImpactTracker™ enables users to identify the stakeholders (policy makers), beneficiaries (both minorities and the wider society), and then demonstrate the impact of influencing policy in a direction that has a positive impact and helps move the dial towards realising the SDG.
By automating peer review processes and supercharging evidence gathering, ImpactTracker™ ensures that projects can be demonstrated with greater confidence and transparency, helping organisations and individuals easily align their activities towards the creation of a sustainable future.
To learn more about ImpactTracker™ and how matching impact to the SDGs offers a positive solution for speeding up progress towards sustainability targets and solving grand challenges such as the climate crisis, please visit our website.