At a recent gathering of purpose and ESG executives at the Fortune Impact Initiative annual meeting, we facilitated a discussion around the topic of corporate impact sprawl, a concept we covered in detail in a recent feature with Fortune. This is an increasingly common phenomenon, which we describe as the fragmentation of social-impact-related efforts within an organization that is driven by the many different pressures companies must respond to—from customers, shareholders, regulators, employees, communities, and others.
At the professional services organization Deloitte, we have recognized that given the range of different pressures on the business, the fragmentation of social impact activities is actually natural—and perhaps even necessary—to achieve diverse corporate and community-benefit goals.
