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The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. We all want our companies to make a real difference, but how often does our message truly cut through the noise? It’s a complex challenge: How do we ensure our genuine efforts to create social impact actually resonate with the people we want to reach? Because in today’s world, simply doing good isn’t enough; we need to communicate the impact of that work effectively to build trust and inspire real change. Build trust through transparency These days, with everything online, people expect brands to be upfront and honest. Being transparent isnt just a nice thing to do; its how to build trust. Patagonia stands out in this area, demonstrating how their sustainability efforts and environmental impact can cultivate a loyal customer base that genuinely trusts their brand. With initiatives like Footprint Chronicles, they give a peek behind the curtain, showing where their products come from and exactly how they affect the environmentfor example, in terms of carbon footprint and water use. This level of transparency has not only built trust with Patagonias customers but also inspired confidence in their brand. Research shows that genuinely conveying your social responsibility values and illustrating how you operate by those values, significantly enhances consumer trust and loyalty Engage employees and communities Effective engagement goes beyond building trust; it’s also about connecting with employees and communities in meaningful ways. Ben & Jerry’s does a great job of getting their employees and customers involved in social justice initiatives and sharing their stories in different ways. They highlight the contributions of employees and customers who are making a difference, fostering a sense of belonging and connection. At Humble, our model is built on empowering customers to support important causes while getting games, books, or software they love. Through our Humble Choice subscription service and monthly bundles, we make it easy for our community to contribute to charities while shopping for great deals. We also use our platform to help our charity partners get their message out to more people. Each month, we feature a selected charity partner across our social media channels and dedicate space on our YouTube channel for them to share their mission and work with our community of millions. Additionally, we profile their initiatives on our blog, providing additional visibility and context about the causes we support. This approach not only highlights these organizations impactful work, but also demonstrates how businesses can use their platforms to authentically amplify significant social and environmental causes. By finding ways to foster these types of connections, businesses can strengthen their audiences engagement with the social impact initiatives theyve worked hard to build. Beyond initiative-by-initiative engagement, companies that are doing this work should consider implementing proactive communication strategies that focus on telling the companys overall social impact story in an authentic and engaging way. As an example, our recently finalized 2024 Social Impact Report highlights our efforts across the year, colorfully illustrating how the $12.4 million we raised with our community last year made a meaningful difference for more than 4,500 charities worldwide that we were able to support. Strategies for authentic communication To build engagement and trust around their CSR initiatives, companies can adopt specific social impact communication strategies: Transparency in reporting: Be open and share detailed reports about your social impact. Its a great way to make an impression with your audience and show youre truly committed. TOMS Shoes sets a great example by sharing comprehensive reports on their One for One model, which outlines the impact of every purchase on communities in need. Companies should consider tracking metrics like community feedback or employee engagement levels to enhance their reporting. Storytelling: Tell stories about the impact of your work. It helps people really connect emotionally with what youre doing. Warby Parker effectively highlights the lives changed through their buy-a-pair, give-a-pair program. For instance, they share stories of how access to glasses has improved education and education outcomes for recipients, showcasing the tangible difference their initiative makes. Regular updates and engagement: Make sure you keep your community in the loop about what youre doing and how its going with regular updates. Salesforce excels at this by providing annual sustainability reports that detail its initiatives. Companies can also use platforms like newsletters or social media for ongoing engagement. Understand your audience: Really knowing what your audience cares about is key to making your message land. Use the right tone, speak their language, and focus on what matters to them. At Humble, we understand that our community is passionate about gaming and giving back. On the product side, we curate bundles that align with these interests, pairing great content with opportunities to support meaningful causes, and then we take every opportunity we can to tie it all together with relevant outreach through blogs, videos, social media, and more. This approach strengthens engagement and reinforces shared values. A call to action When companies communicate well, it can bring everyone togetheremployees, customers, and the wider community. It can build trust, get people involved, and help create real change. As we continue our journey at Humble, we remain committed to these principlesleveraging our platform not only as a marketplace but as a tool for meaningful change driven by our passionate community of gamers and givers alike. By focusing on clear, relatable communication, we can collectively strengthen our ability to create the positive change the world needs.
Category:
E-Commerce
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. In a world increasingly shaped by the potential of artificial intelligence, the life sciences industry may be one of the largest beneficiaries of its transformative potential. Artificial intelligence (AI) has already revolutionized elements of the drug discovery and development process, redefined research methodologies, enhanced disease detection and diagnosis, and paved the way for personalized medicine. Knowing that we have just begun to scratch the surface of AIs potential, I am excited to see how its continued evolution will accelerate our collective mission of bringing novel medicines to patients in need. But I am also cognizant of its limitations. While we can outsource human tasks to AI, we simply cannot outsource humanity. AI is not intelligent when it comes to emotion, imagination, empathy, or qualities critical to creating and leading. Similarly, the spark of ingenuity and the recognition of serendipity exists solely within the bounds of the human experience. AI also lacks context and nuancea critical component when considering the myriad factors needed to be successful in drug development, such as evaluating patient needs, defining new white spaces in an increasingly competitive environment, and other macro considerations. A case study for humanity In founding Tarsus, we set out to develop a treatment for a large, underdiagnosed eyelid disease, Demodex blepharitis (DB). Both the literature and our discussions with many eye care providers validated early on that this was a highly prevalent disease, with very low disease awareness, and no FDA-approved therapies. We needed to prove how significant the unmet need was and build a market that would support an entirely new category in eye careand there were no benchmarks to assist us in establishing a path forward. Our early clinical trials were conducted in Mexico City. I recall sitting in a large eye hospital, packed with hundreds of patients and family members of all ages, while we worked with the eye care team to find patients with visible signs of DB. After many hours searching individual clinics for DB patients with very little return, we questioned our initial prevalence modeling and wondered whether this disease was, in fact, as large as we predicted. Recognizing a potential lost opportunity in front of me, our clinical team used the microphone for the waiting area. In Spanish, we asked if anyone in the waiting roomwhether they were there to see a doctor or notwas experiencing eyelid irritation, redness, crusting, and itching (all signs of DB). To our surprise, a couple dozen people stood up and got in line to be seen by an eye care provider, and roughly half of them were diagnosed with DB during a routine exam. This serendipitous moment changed everything, and it would not have occurred without several very human elements: instinct, informed risk taking, and an inherent sense of how to connect and engage with other humans. After seeing hundreds of people line up over the next few months, we knew we had uncovered a unique opportunity to potentially serve millions of patients living with DB. Active listening and human connections Our Mexico City experience further reinforced that AI is no match for the type of insights and perspectives that can be gained from human-centric approaches like active listening and empathy. These very personal interactions inform the work we do every day across every aspect of our businessfrom clinical development to strategic marketing to building an award-winning culture, and so much more. More recently, as we listened carefully to the thousands of doctors now prescribing our treatment for DB and doing careful eyelid exams, we identified another large, underdiagnosed eye disease, ocular rosacea, that now presents a promising opportunity in our pipeline to potentially serve millions more. The human ability to adapt, relate, and emotionally connect with other humans, and our aptitude to make ethical and rational decisions has ensured that people come first in medicine and science. And that will not change. It is clear we are on the cusp of a technology-enabled revolution that will improve howand how quicklywe can deliver innovative new treatments to patients. And we are finding numerous ways to strategically leverage AI. But our collective success as an industry will be dictated by our ability to maintain a nimble, empathetic, and uniquely human-centered approach. Bobak Azamian, MD, PhD is CEO and chairman of Tarsus Pharmaceuticals.
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E-Commerce
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Tariffs, trade, imports, exports, prioritization, energy, and dominance are all words that have been flooding the headlines lately. In this world of globalization, it is an equilibrium of exchanges, ensuring we have enough of something but not too much. We see this balance come to life in supply and demand graphs of critical minerals, often in the context of batteries or energy dominance. The supply and demand of materials required to support growing energy-related technology and sectors, such as energy storage needs, plays a crucial role in the critical minerals market, both in the United States and globally. Today, the U.S. imports a large number of batteries that are used in consumer devices, vehicles, military, and grid storage. And the demand for batteries is set to continue growing quickly based on current policy settings, estimated to rise by more than four times by 2030 and by at least seven-fold by 2035. This growth is a clear sign that the owner of the critical minerals source will hold more control over the supply chain. This is why a diversified approach to critical minerals is vital. Battery recycling is a key to that strategybecoming a major source of domestically manufactured critical materials. Chinas control in the lithium-ion battery manufacturing industry is expected to decline between now and 2034, which can be attributed to cell manufacturing operations coming online in other regions. To further highlight this shift in the global marketplace, the U.S. battery recycling market size was estimated at $374.28 million in 2023, and is estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 38.1% from 2024 to 2030. Diversify and stabilize domestic supply chains Original equipment manufacturers and battery cell manufacturers are not slowing down their production timelines and the global demand for large-format batteries will continue to rise. The U.S. must capitalize on these opportunities to diversify and stabilize domestic supply chains, all while becoming a leading producer of critical minerals. Materials from recycled content will play an increasingly important part in meeting this demand, with predictions that battery recycling could meet 20-30% of lithium, nickel, and cobalt demand by 2050. Reuse of critical minerals is necessary to diversify and domesticate our supply chains and is work that is already being done. To further the need for increasing battery recycling capacity, the critical minerals market will begin to experience an undersupply in the form of black mass (the output of end-of-life and scrap batteries that have been recycled and processed that is put back into the supply chain), as early as 2026. For example, by 2030, lithium will see a supply and demand gap that is considered high risk, according to the International Energy Agency, due to price volatility and high geopolitical risk factors in the countries its currently sourced from. The expected growth, combined with supply gaps, is why the U.S. needs to continue its focus on enhancing our domestic critical minerals supply chains, with a heavy emphasis on recycled content. Recycling is important The U.S. has developed a large battery recycling capacity in anticipation of the large number of end-of-life batteries predicted to enter the market. Fueled by public and private investments, the United States battery recycling and critical mineral refinement sectors are fundamental to becoming a divergent player and seriously competing with those in Asia for the limited supplies of black mass. To encourage the build-out of battery recycling capacity, we must recognize that it aligns with domestic priorities related to the sourcing of critical materials. Strengthening our domestic supply chains will position the U.S. as a leading producer of critical minerals; it furthers the National Defense Stockpile sources to reduce the nations mineral reliance on foreign entities of concern; and it accelerates access to domestically sourced critical minerals, enhancing national security and global competitiveness. The largest operating mine of critical minerals is in our pockets, offices, garages, on the roads, and supplying energy to data centers and power grids.Recycling these materials at their end-of-life is a must. David Klanecky is CEO and president of Cirba Solutions.
Category:
E-Commerce
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