Summary:
Discover how nonprofit Elemental Impact uses OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to invest in climate technology and social impact. Learn how they align OKRs with their five-year plan, and remain flexible on the way to achieving ambitious goals.
Aligning OKRs with the 5-year plan
“One of the privileges of a nonprofit is that we get to find gaps and move into them,” says Dawn Lippert, founder and CEO of Elemental Impact. As a nonprofit investor, Elemental focuses on gaps at the intersection of climate change, social justice, and social impact.
One: Invest in startup success.
Two: Partner Deeply.
Three: Inspire Action.
As Lippert was scaling the organization to drive impact, she brought on COO Avra van der Zee to help the team think through a big question: “How do we take a well-articulated vision and break it down to a year-over-year action plan?”
Part of their answer is by using OKRs.
Going from strategy to OKRs
As a first step, Elemental translated their strategic pillars into three global Objectives. It was easy, and some of their Key Results were very straightforward too. For instance, a Key Result for ‘Investing in Startup Success’ became ‘Catalyzing $20 billion into climate technology,’ easily meeting all the criteria for a good Key Result: specific, actionable, measurable, time-bound and aggressively realistic. Other Key Results, however, proved elusive. Take ‘Partnering Deeply’ — how would Elemental define and measure ‘depth’?
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