Hannah Keartland

All three have to line up.

• Ethical and responsible behaviour can strengthen a brand and make a business more resilient, Keartland argues, but cannot compensate for a weak product or service.
• They use the framework as an assessment tool, not a slogan, mapping the entire business—from products, supply chain and pricing to employee benefits, banking and charitable partnerships—to identify commercial and impact opportunities.

Keartland bought chocolate that ticked the ethical and sustainable boxes but did not taste good, then contrasted it with Tony's Chocolonely, whose purpose is to eliminate exploitation in the cocoa supply chain.

• The market wants chocolate that tastes good, Keartland argues, which is why Tony's can sell it: sales rose 20% to over €240 million, volumes grew 4% while the wider chocolate industry declined for a second year, and the company stayed profitable despite cocoa prices, currency swings and tariffs.
• Keartland also recounts a chief executive interrupting mid-sentence to say he had been sceptical that they could show him anything new, then telling them their questions had set his brain going.
• Keartland presents the reaction as proof that the framework can surface opportunities an owner has stopped seeing.

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They ask for a benchmark, a year-on-year trend or the target an organisation is measured against, and say missing context is the most common weakness in the reports they review.

• The point is not to demand more data: most people rarely have all the data they would like, and that is normal.
• The practical rule is to anchor every number you include so readers understand what it means and why it matters.

Keartland's son's school test results arrived as a list of subjects and numbers, with no median or range, comparison with previous tests or sense of the teacher's expectations.

• They could not tell whether 60% was fine or concerning.
• Keartland applies the same problem to businesses: an emissions figure becomes useful when paired with the admission that reductions had flattened and the supply chain now needs attention.
• A 50% rise in applications from people without a university education means more when set against a stated target for 2027.

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Their method starts by asking the client what success would look like, then agreeing key messages and narrative at a kick-off session to avoid endless back-and-forth.

• They keep the timeline honest when things slip and finish with a washup session to capture what worked and what to change next time.
• Keartland frames this as relief for teams already overwhelmed by their day jobs—a problem they hear about most often when people discuss impact reporting.
• The same method informs their reviews of other organisations' reports: they identify what works, then press on the strategic questions left open.

After a project, a chief financial officer responsible for impact and sustainability told Keartland they valued them as a "forcing function" throughout: holding timelines, communicating the effect of slippage on the launch date and getting the report finished to a high standard.

• Reviewing Pollen Careers' first impact report, Keartland praised its win-win business model, use of internal and third-party data, and authentic case studies and quotes.
• They then raised three questions about context, how the organisation plans to scale impact and what had not gone to plan.

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A report can help retain a biggest client, engage and attract staff as part of the employee value proposition, support pitches or attract the right kind of investor.

• For every client, the process creates a pause to reflect and correct course, making it part of strategy and planning rather than marketing.
• On the new B Corp Standards, Keartland warns that the assessment is not the hard part; the board-level mindset shift is.
• They have seen that shift stall completely.

Keartland lists clients who used a report to keep their biggest client, celebrate their team, stand out when pitching for work and bring in investment. They also suggest a question to ask before committing budget to the new standards: look at the mindset problem before the paperwork.

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Some build strong governance around an objective process, some rely entirely on intuition and experience, and most blend the two.

• Keartland tends to trust the early feeling that something is not right, then keeps recalibrating while working with a client, watching for instructions that are technically legal but ethically dubious, such as a firm's approach to tax.
• They extend the argument to advisers generally: because professional services firms see their clients' transactions and choices, they hold up a mirror and nudge behaviour, whether they intend to or not.

Keartland describes their accountant, named in the post, as an extra layer of conscience: knowing every transaction is visible makes them think twice about ordering from Amazon, driving instead of taking the train, or buying new equipment rather than refurbished.

• Their client-selection questions include whether a client pays on time, whether the team enjoys working with them, and whether they genuinely want to improve their impact or just tick a box quickly.
• The research was published as a report and discussed in a virtual fireside chat with three named business leaders, who, Keartland says, spoke candidly rather than as a polished panel.

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It means the ability to keep going, not just carbon accounting.

• Their advice to businesses is to understand how they affect people and the planet, and how those in turn affect the business, then use that understanding to reduce risk and spot opportunity.
• The strongest position in Keartland's account is that businesses treating sustainability as a market opportunity, not only risk mitigation, do best.

Guests at the event make specific points in Keartland's write-up: Simon Gray framed sustainability risk as affecting whether a business can succeed and grow; Jennifer Tankard linked recent shocks to energy security and supply chain resilience; Louise Hellem said businesses that understand their supply chains withstand shocks better; Ravi Abeywardana suggested working through the profit and loss account and balance sheet line by line to find the lines most sensitive to shocks; and Lizzy Girling, from a lender perspective, said sustainability is now embedded in lending decisions because it signals whether the money will come back.

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They admit to doing it, despite knowing it is not doable.

• Impact objectives—the things people genuinely care about—are usually the ones squeezed out.
• Their advice: stop, choose the single impact item to get over the line before year-end, be strict about the choice and go public with the commitment, because saying it out loud helps.

Keartland named the report summarising their research conversations on embedding purpose and impact in professional services as the one thing they would finish before the end of the year, and invited readers to share theirs.

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Keartland describes buying ethical chocolate that ticked the sustainability boxes but tasted bad, then contrasts it with Tony's Chocolonely.

• They explain Tony's purpose of ending exploitation in the cocoa supply chain, the market's desire for good-tasting chocolate and the commercial results: sales up 20% to over €240 million, 4% volume growth while the wider chocolate industry saw volumes decline, and profitability despite cocoa prices, exchange rate swings and tariffs.
• They set out a three-part test: what the market wants, what you can do and your impact objectives.
• The argument is concrete: being ethical and responsible enhances a brand but cannot make up for a poor product.

For brands planning a campaign

For a workshop or guest expert session, this is a ready-made case study in purpose-driven business. It moves from a familiar product to a framework in minutes, then gives the audience a practical test for their own offers.

Keartland calls Pollen Careers' first impact report one of the best they have read.

• They highlight three strengths: a win-win-win business model connecting young people seeking first jobs with businesses hiring entry-level roles; data grounded in both company and third-party sources; and an authentic feel created by case studies, photos and quotes.
• They then ask three questions about context, scaling impact and challenges, showing that praise and scrutiny belong together.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful as a live or pre-read example for impact reporting training.

• It demonstrates a practical approach: identify what works, explain why, then ask the strategic questions.
• A workshop can use Keartland's questions as an exercise.

Keartland compares useless school test results for their son with impact reports that list numbers without context.

• They point out three missing anchors: comparison with a median or range, year-on-year trends, and the objectives the person is measured against.
• They offer two rewritten examples that add meaning, including emissions flattening and a 50% increase in applications from people without a university education.
• The rule is direct: double-check that every number has context.

For brands planning a campaign

A strong teaching segment for a workshop: familiar, light and immediately actionable. It gives participants a checklist to apply to their own impact report data.

After a project, Keartland facilitates a washup session for everyone involved.

• In this post, a CFO says they appreciated Keartland's project management of the impact report: asking what success would look like at the start, agreeing key messages and narrative at kick-off, driving timelines and holding a washup to capture learnings.
• Keartland connects this process to the overwhelm many teams feel when producing a report on top of their day jobs.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful for positioning a guest expert session around process, not just messaging. It shows the operating method a client would get: scope, narrative agreement, timeline pressure and retrospective learning.

Keartland says they spoke with 35 business leaders about how they choose clients.

• Some rely on governance and objective processes; others rely on intuition and experience, such as whether clients pay on time or are enjoyable to work with.
• Most blend both.
• Keartland describes a gut check in first meetings and over time: whether clients genuinely want to work on impact or just tick a box, and whether they make legally permitted but ethically dubious decisions, such as on tax.

For brands planning a campaign

A concrete discussion prompt for professional services audiences: how to decide which clients and projects to take on when saying no feels costly. The material also draws on conversations with business leaders.

Keartland challenges the assumption that impact reporting is only for B Corps.

• They give examples: one business used the report to keep its biggest client; many professional services clients use it to engage and celebrate their team and attract new people; one firm pulls sections into pitches; and one used it to attract the right investor.
• For all clients, Keartland says the report creates time to pause, reflect and correct course, and comes with strategic impact advice.

For brands planning a campaign

For a guest session, this broadens the audience beyond sustainability teams. It frames impact reporting as a business development, employee engagement and strategy tool, making the workshop relevant to CEOs and professional services leaders.

A school test-results analogy carries the core argument: a figure without a benchmark, a year-on-year comparison or a stated target tells readers nothing, because 60% could be fine or poor depending on what everyone else scored.

• They treat the report as a managed project: agree what success looks like at the start, settle key messages early to cut back-and-forth, track how slippage affects the launch date, and run a washup session to capture what worked and what to change.
• They also review other organisations’ reports in public, praising grounded internal and third-party data, a clear win-win business model and real case studies, while pressing on context, scale and challenges left out of the report.

For brands planning a campaign

A strong anchor for a guest session on impact reporting. A workshop can move from data anchors to a report project plan and a review checklist drawn from the critiques, giving attendees tools to apply to a live report.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

The Tony’s Chocolonely case makes the point sharply: the company’s purpose is eliminating exploitation in the cocoa supply chain, but its commercial success rests on chocolate people actually want; ethical credentials did not rescue a product that was not enjoyable.

• They describe a chief executive interrupting mid-sentence to say the questions had set his brain going.
• The framework maps an entire business—from products, supply chain and pricing to employee benefits, banking and charitable partnerships—to help spot commercial and impact opportunities together.

Applied in one-to-one conversations with business leaders and taught in free masterclasses, rather than presented as theory.

The chocolate example deliberately pushes back on the assumption that ethical credentials alone drive commercial success.

For brands planning a campaign

Offers a ready-made teaching structure and worked example. A workshop could apply the three questions to attendees’ own businesses and produce a shortlist of opportunities.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4

Recurring questions include how to integrate impact into client work so it feels genuinely valuable rather than bolted on; how to choose clients and projects when saying no feels like leaving money on the table; and how to create capacity for impact when billable hours dominate.

• Keartland describes pairing formal governance with intuition in client selection: standard know-your-client checks, a gut sense, and attention to instructions that are technically legal but ethically dubious.
• They also note how advisers shape client behaviour simply by seeing the numbers, describing their own accountant as an extra layer of conscience.

For brands planning a campaign

A direct fit for a consultancy audience. A workshop can use their client-selection questions and the capacity problem to help attendees make their impact work deliverable, not aspirational.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

The speakers they quote argue that sustainability risk affects whether a business can succeed and grow, that understanding your supply chain helps a business withstand shocks, and that lenders are embedding sustainability risk in lending decisions.

• One lender’s view stands out: the strongest businesses treat sustainability as a market opportunity, not only as risk mitigation.
• Keartland’s own framing is that sustainability at heart means the ability to keep going, a broader idea than carbon or environmental work.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful for audiences that include finance, risk or lending functions and need impact framed as commercial resilience, not ethics alone.

Examples: Source 1

They also argue that the process creates a pause to reflect and correct course. On the new B Corp Standards, they warn that the hardest part will not be the assessment but the mindset shift needed at board level, which they say they have seen stall completely.

For brands planning a campaign

Lets the session open with motivation before method: who in the room needs the report, and what for? That is often the blocker before data or design.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4

Impact objectives people genuinely care about are the ones that get squeezed. Their advice: stop, pick the one impact item to get over the line before year-end, be strict about it, and go public with the commitment, as they did with their own research report.

For brands planning a campaign

Works well as a closing workshop exercise: each attendee leaves with one named impact commitment, not a long plan.

Examples: Source 1

They run free masterclasses on their framework, a public series reviewing other organisations’ impact reports, and offer a downloadable impact reporting roadmap.

• Their professional-services research was published as a report and discussed in a virtual fireside chat with three business leaders they describe as candid rather than polished.
• They also publish a monthly newsletter and run a separate impact reporting masterclass.
• Dates named in the posts point to November sessions.

For brands planning a campaign

Shows the shape a guest contribution usually takes—a framework-led talk, a review session or a candid conversation with practitioners—so a proposed session can complement rather than repeat their existing formats.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4 · Source 5

They say it helps purpose-led CEOs grow positive impact and commercial success together, reports on progress through an impact report, and signs posts selling its services and taking on clients.

Original disclosure

I'm Hannah Keartland, founder of B Corp consultancy Keartland & Co, where we help purpose-led CEOs grow positive impact and commercial success hand-in-hand … and report on their progress through an impact report.

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Davies is credited in the footer of posts about the consultancy's services. Ask how their working collaboration is structured.

Original disclosure

Impact reporting… Heather Davies and I can take the load off you, remove the overwhelm and help you create an engaging impact report that builds trust, inspires action and reflects your progress.

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They link to the report and to their wider review series.

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Their posts cover advisory work around B Corp certification.

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She develops the case through worked examples including Tony's Chocolonely, OceanSaver and Wholegrain Digital, writing for business leaders deciding what their company is for.

Ras-Jones focuses on building a mission-led business: defining its purpose, choosing an industry problem worth solving and showing staff how their roles connect to it.

• Keartland starts further along, with organisations that already accept the purpose question.
• Their focus is the impact report, its underlying data and the project discipline needed to publish it.
• Where Ras-Jones asks what your mission should be, Keartland asks how you prove and steer it.

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Like Keartland, she argues that carbon accounting should sit inside operational processes. Hobson tells logistics providers to build emissions capability into their systems, pricing and procurement behaviour, and to treat better data as a commercial advantage rather than a reporting burden.

Hobson is a freight and logistics specialist.

• She writes in detail about transport emissions methodologies such as ISO 14083, Scope 3 categories such as upstream and downstream distribution, and the procurement functions she identifies as the bottleneck.
• Keartland works across sectors; their focus is the impact report and strategy conversation, not the calculation method behind a transport emissions figure.

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Both argue that decarbonisation stalls on commercial processes, not willingness: Hurrey's suppliers say they are asked to decarbonise, then bought from on price. That is the gap Keartland describes between stated impact goals and day-to-day decisions.

Hurrey works at network scale on Scope 3 and procurement, bringing peer groups, supplier surveys and summits to buyers and suppliers.

• His focus is supplier engagement and procurement decisions.
• Keartland works at company scale with individual leaders; their output is a report and a set of strategic questions, not a cross-industry programme.

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Her posts answer the objections that surface in a workshop — that purpose and profit always clash, that the problem is too small, that it is not the participants' place to act — and then hand people something to do: list the negative social and environmental impacts of your own industry, then pick one.

• She names businesses that make impact through the product itself rather than a buy-one-give-one add-on (Tony's Chocolonely, OceanSaver, Wholegrain Digital) and lists four fixable reasons purpose and profit drift apart: a cause instead of a purpose, a purpose that is not well defined, no strategy to deliver it, and a team that cannot see the link between purpose and profit.
• For the same guest-session need, that gives a consultancy a diagnostic angle and a completed exercise to build on.

Hannah Keartland's posts stop at how to become mission-led.

• They show no method for writing, structuring or reviewing an impact report — no reporting criteria, template, review questions or roadmap — so a session promising practical help with the annual report would have to supply that content itself.
• Their published review series, report questions and downloadable roadmap speak to teams already producing a report, which is the gap Ras-Jones's posts do not cover.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Her posts report on current standards and their commercial consequences — the GHG Protocol's proposed Scope 3 revisions covering a 95% coverage requirement and disclosure of primary versus secondary data, and ISO 14083 becoming the recognised method for transport emissions — and she makes an argument a room can act on: procurement anchored to lowest-cost buying is the bottleneck, not the technology.

• She closes with concrete preparation steps for logistics providers, from aligning calculations with ISO 14083 to training teams to explain methodologies to customers.
• For a procurement-heavy audience this is closer to their daily decisions than a general reporting talk.

The content is sector-specific and standards-led, so an audience without freight or transport context would need an introduction before it is useful.

• The two posts offer current regulatory detail and field synthesis, not a repeatable workshop format, exercise, template or client-facing resource.
• If the need is a framework participants can apply to their own business the next week, Keartland's material is the stronger base; if the need is to explain what the latest transport emissions rules mean and how to prepare, Hobson is the better speaker.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

His posts report a survey of more than 500 suppliers on what they want their customers to understand, and turn it into five messages for procurement teams with figures attached: 43% raised cost or said sustainability does not count when contracts are awarded; 24% said their biggest emissions are set by customer specifications or directed sourcing; one in five flagged a one-person sustainability team. He convenes the Scope 3 Peer Group and runs briefings and summits that bring buyers and suppliers into the same room, so he can speak credibly about cross-company collaboration and about the gap between what buyers ask for and what suppliers can deliver.

His centre of gravity is convening a peer group and reporting on peer activity, events and collaborations, not teaching one company how to produce its own impact report.

• The audience is procurement and supply chain rather than the professional-services and SME purpose audience Keartland typically addresses.
• Pick Keartland when the deliverable is a hands-on session that leaves attendees with a rewritten metric and a named commitment; pick Hurrey when the deliverable is a supplier-engagement briefing backed by what suppliers actually say.

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