IMPACT VALUE PROPOSITIONS
Delivering customer value and system change
Organisations that work to improve people's lives or the natural environment often distinguish between two things: the benefit their product or service offering creates for the people who use or buy it, and the wider change the organisation wants to help achieve. Both represent value that is created, but the connection between them is not always as strong as it should be.
A product or service can succeed commercially without advancing the organisation's impact goal. The reverse is also true: an impact goal will remain an ambition if people have too little reason to adopt, pay for or continue using the offering.
Impact Value Proposition design therefore keeps the strengths of conventional value proposition design while adding a clear link to the impact the organisation wants to help achieve.
How a value proposition is constructed
Value proposition design helps an organisation explain why someone would choose a product or service and how the organisation can sustain it. A value proposition usually brings together the following elements:
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Stakeholder (customer, user, beneficiary): the person or organisation that will use, buy, fund, support or benefit from the offering.
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Need: the problem to solve, task to complete or improvement the stakeholder wants.
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Offering: the product, service or capability provided by the organisation.
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Value for the stakeholder: the benefit that makes the offering worth adopting.
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Value for the organisation: the revenue, resources or other return that allows the organisation to continue providing the offering.
Value is realised through use and interaction, and several stakeholders may help create or receive it. For example, the paying customer, user, beneficiary and delivery partner.
A value proposition can show who benefits without explaining how the product or service offering contributes to the wider change an organization wants to make. Impact Value Proposition design must therefore ask: what changes because this particular offering is adopted and used?
Impact Value Proposition design
An Impact Value Proposition adds a clear link between the product or service offering and the intended impact. Adoption and use need to produce an outcome, and that outcome needs to contribute to wider change.
This connection needs to be designed into the product or service, the way it is used and the outcome it supports. Five design principles help make this practical.
EXAMPLE:
Consider an environmental monitoring service used by land managers. It creates user value by providing reliable information about habitat condition and where action is needed to restore it. When land managers use that information to change restoration priorities or practices, the service helps produce an outcome: better-targeted action. This can contribute to healthier habitats and biodiversity recovery.
Five design principles for Impact Value Propositions
1. Connect use to an outcome
The product or service offering is the starting point, not the impact itself. The proposition should explain what changes when the offering is used and how that outcome contributes to the intended impact.
EXAMPLE:
For the monitoring service, access to better information is not yet the outcome. The relevant outcome occurs when a land manager can act on it with a decision or action. Better decision making in restoration activities then lead to improved habitat condition and, over time, biodiversity recovery.
2. Design for recurring use to make lasting change
Adoption and recurring use are commercially important because they provide revenue and brand loyalty. They can also matter for impact, because lasting change often depends on decisions and actions being repeated over time.
EXAMPLE:
A one-off environmental survey can provide a useful baseline, but it cannot show whether conditions are changing or whether restoration activities are working. When comparable monitoring is repeated and connected to decision-making, land managers can adjust their work and review the result. Recurring use then supports both a viable service business model and a lasting change in how restoration is managed.
3. Design for multiple stakeholders
Impact is rarely achieved by a single actor. One product or service may therefore support several impact pathways, with a separate Impact Value Proposition for each stakeholder.
EXAMPLE:
A land manager may value clear guidance on where to deploy restoration activities. A funder may value credible information about progress when deciding where to invest. A public authority may value comparable information across locations to assess service providers. A local community may value understandable information that helps it take part in decisions. Each stakeholder plays a different role and receives a different form of value from using the product or service. These are separate value propositions, not different descriptions of the same benefit. Together, they support more effective restoration, funding, coordination and participation.
4. Define the contribution clearly
The proposition should state what the offering can influence and what depends on people, resources or conditions outside the organisation's control.
EXAMPLE:
The monitoring service can improve information and support better decisions, but it cannot restore a habitat on its own. Progress also depends on funding availability, the quality of the execution and ecological conditions. Stating these dependencies makes the proposition more credible and shows where partnerships or further support are needed.
5. Test the proposition and build evidence
An Impact Value Proposition is a claim about contribution, so testing should examine whether stakeholders receive the expected value, adopt and continue using the offering, change decisions or actions because of it, and help achieve the intended impact through those outcomes.
EXAMPLE:
For the monitoring service, evidence can show whether land managers use the information, change restoration priorities and achieve better results over time. It can also reveal weaknesses: the information may arrive too late, be difficult to use or fail to reach the person making the decision. Testing improves the service while building evidence for its contribution to impact.
Value propositions that bring impact goals within reach
An Impact Value Proposition does not only define how a product or service creates value for its users. It also describes how the offering contributes to system change.
Stakeholder value and impact are therefore part of the same design challenge. The product or service offering must be worth adopting and using, while its use must contribute to the outcomes and pathways through which wider change becomes possible.
By connecting stakeholder value, use, impact pathways and evidence, Impact Value Proposition design brings impact goals within reach.
21 September 2026 - Stella van den Berg
Value for the customer is a prerequisite for adoption and use, which is needed to achieve the outcomes that are required to contribute to the wider change.
Five design principles for Impact Value Propositions.