Growing and strengthening the impact economy

This is the prepared written version of the CEO’s Ignites 2025 opening keynote. The live delivery included natural differences in phrasing, but the core message remains the same.

Good morning everyone, and welcome to NPC Ignites 2025. It is great to see so many of you here, I want to start by recognising the team at NPC who have done an amazing job, they have worked really hard to bring people together from across our community; philanthropists, practitioners, policymakers, all of you changemakers. Sitting with both purpose led organisations and wealth holders is a big part of NPC’s role, but making that happen takes real effort, so thank-you to Rebecca, Flora and Gabbie and all the people at NPC who are making today happen. I hope this is going to be a great day.

The content today, as Alex explained, is primarily designed to be information, but also we want you to talk, to quote Noah Yuval Harari when explaining what made humans evolve in a different way to other animals in his brilliant book Sapiens, “Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.” So, I urge you to tell a story to someone you don’t know today, a story about your work, about how you partner with others, and maybe how you can make new stories together.

And if you don’t know me, that person can be me.

Ignites last year was my first NPC event, so this feels like my work anniversary. And I am delighted to celebrate a good year, and I wanted to use this time to share a little bit about our story, and our plans going forward.

12 months ago I joined NPC with a mandate for change, a challenge from the board, to be ambitious. After 25 years of success the board asked me to look forward, to think about our impact and to create a new goal. I started by going to see four of our founders, each amazing philanthropists who had been fortunate enough to make more money than they needed and who had chosen to spend some of that money on backing an ambitious project.

They explained that in 2002, a time before some people in this room were even born, that as philanthropists they felt there was a gap in measuring and communicating the impact of the charities they were looking to fund. As one of them said, “no one could explain to me, the impact the money was going to have”.

They told me how proud they were with NPC today, and rightly so. I was at a dinner for a small community charity last Thursday night and on the tables along with the standard brochure you get at these things was an impact report complete with theory of change. I do not think that would have existed 25 years ago. Sometimes amongst the business of day to day we forget to stop and credit a job well done. I want to acknowledge the achievement of NPC staff and others over the last 25 years in prioritising impact and learning conversations. I particularly want to pause and honour one of our founders, Peter Wheeler, who very sadly passed away two weeks ago. Without Peter there would be no NPC, so it felt appropriate to particularly, reference his contribution.

Back to my meeting with our founders – As always with ambitious mission-driven people they were keener to talk to me about “what now?”’ As they did 25 years ago, they wanted to see NPC drive more impact. Simple to say I said, “Any idea how?” They were generous enough to let me and the team answer the how.

But what a great brief. Be more impactful.

Firstly, we agreed that we must continue to drive impact measurement, evaluation, and learning. The vast majority of our time is spent helping organisations, foundations and wealth holders and we will continue to do that. I believe in the power of consultancy, maybe it is not quite the same as believing in democracy or equality of opportunity, but consultancy works, and NPC is clear that our role is to work with ambitious organisations that want to increase their impact. Just last week we held a planning session with a foundation focused on ending child poverty in the UK and we brought together 15 organisations from across Youth Mental Health to share knowledge and think through collaborations.

We will continue to do this important work, trying to innovate as we always have done. For example, we are currently building an AI theory of change tool. Because we recognise, many people are turning to AI to answer strategic questions, and theory of change will be no different. So, when someone from a 5-person poverty charity types into Chat GPT “help me write a theory of change”, we want to ensure that result is the best it can be.

I also want to underline our commitment to making sure we and our partners share our learnings, and work in the open. Ignites is a clear part of that, and later today you will hear from NPC legend Tris Lumley on how we are thinking about sharing and openness.

However, our ambition goes beyond the impact of the money currently in the system.  Like we drove the impact conversation over the last 25 years, today we want to drive a conversation about how much money intentionally targets positive impact in the UK. And, to be clear we want to increase the amount of money.

To some ‘more’ might sound a bit reductive, but more money, I call it growing the pie, means you can all do more things. And when we looked at what our impact could be over the next 25 years, we saw a gap for an organisation focused on growing the impact economy.

Firstly, NPC intends to focus more on telling the story of impact in the UK, particularly to those individuals, families, companies and foundations who have the means to increase the money flowing into the Impact Economy.

That phrase I have just used twice, ‘the Impact economy’ it is important. I appreciate conversations about terminology can be tedious, but as a community, that in monetary terms is as big as, if not bigger, than the retail, manufacturing or the creative economy, we have an opportunity to frame all the good work being done in a simple story we can all feel part of.

And I love a simple story. At times, because we deal with complex serious issues we can be guilty of complicating our message, which can be a barrier to recruiting more people.  For example, there are lots of different ways people try and have a positive impact. Charities, Social Enterprises, B-Corps, CICs, social finance, impact investment, catalytic capital to name a few. Each of these ‘structures’ have value and different impacts, but explaining the differences can feel complex and confusing and often ends up excluding someone. The Impact Economy is a ‘catch all’ recognised by Government who last week announced the opening of the Office for the Impact Economy. It is inclusive of all of those who have the intention of having a positive impact.

It recognises that new forms of civil society have surged, both formal and informal transforming the landscape. As these models proliferate, the boundaries of “who delivers public good” and the structures through which they do so, have become increasingly blurred.

At NPC, as well as working on projects across the community we are going to talk up the Impact Economy, we are going to share stories of the brilliant people and organisations within it and we are going to do that, because we believe it is an exciting story about an exciting sector in the UK. And, if we tell the story well, people will want to join, creating new projects and importantly bringing in new additional money. We love working in this community and we want to shout about it.

We have already started. Last month along with Barclays we published The Modern Philanthropist, which looked particularly at giving by High-Net-Worth Individuals, and we shared that it was growing annually by an average of eighteen percent a year since 2020, meaning the median amount being given had increased from £5,500 to £12,000. Which is great news. Since that report we have been contacted by banks, individuals and family offices to talk to them about philanthropy, that is one small example of storytelling recruiting more people. Cath Dovey who wrote that report is here, and she is definitely happy to share the story of philanthropy. We are also hosting the Beacon Forum in February, where we hope to bring 500 people from across the wealth holding community together to talk impact.

In a few weeks we are going to publish a report called Impact UK, which is going to discuss what is the impact economy. We have tried to define and quantify it, adding together charities, and other recognised structures like social enterprises, as well as purpose driven business and investments. We have paired this research with the stories of 10 incredible philanthropists who like the original founders of NPC have found themselves in a position with more money than they need and want to help address a societal challenge. And have chosen to do that using multiple instruments. Philanthropists like Edwina Grosvenor who is focused on women in the justice system, have supported businesses and charities alike. The Impact Economy recognises philanthropists like Edwina, charities like Hope Street, social enterprises like Clink and businesses like Redemption Coffee all who are bound together to try and address the challenges of a justice system.

We are publishing the report in January, and you can definitely chat to Erwin, Emma and Sabrina the team working on the report. I want to call out Esmee Fairburn, Mishcon, The Lloyds Bank Foundation and Better Society Capital, four really diverse organisations who have funded this work. As well as Deloitte who have partnered with us on the data.

So, what is our story, our ambition. It is as it was 25 years ago – to create more impact.

As to the how, we will continue, through consulting, to drive impact analysis and share learning, but we will also tell stories about impact in the UK, the amazing people and organisations across our community, so we can attract more people and more money.