We do not yet have dates for the next offering of ESG and Impact Management for Enterprises. Click here to be notified when the next training dates are set.

Past Dates: Thursday April 14, April 21, and April 28, 2022

Format: Virtual and live

Cost: $1,900-2,600 depending on registration date

According to recent reports, about 1 out of every 4 dollars in the capital markets is screened for environmental, social, and governance factors. Along with the global capital markets, many customers and the new millennial workforce are also increasingly expecting companies to show how they are having real impact on the stakeholders they touch, including suppliers, employees, customers, and the planet as a whole.

Companies step into this work in many different ways. Some may start with deep impact in a specific area, such as climate or workforce. Others start by trying to meet compliance needs from regulators. More than 72% of businesses have selected the UN Sustainable Development Goals as their frame for impact. Standards and frameworks from the ESG and impact communities are overlapping and can be confusing. New disclosure requirements are emerging in various regions. In addition, doing this work requires new kinds of internal management changes, as well as external reporting, and these too can be daunting.

Are you trying to integrate new global standards for ESG, sustainability, and impact in ways that protect you from accusations of impact- or green-washing?
Are you interested in learning how to measure, manage, and optimize the impact you are generating without overburdening your teams or stakeholders?
Are you looking for ways to make or substantiate public commitments to social or environmental impact?

CASE invites you to up your impact management game through our new cohort-based online training:

ESG and Impact Management for Enterprises

Practical and actionable: This course helps C-Suite leaders, board members, busy executives, and managers to cut through the noise in the rapidly expanding ESG and impact field to immediately and confidently enhance their practices around ESG and impact management. We have simplified decades of research and guidance on ESG and impact into four universal steps of impact measurement and management: Setting Strategy, Integrating into operations, Optimizing impact, and Reinforcing through governance and reporting. Within each step, we focus on the specific actions, tools, and processes you can adopt to immediately enhance your practices and set a course for continual improvement in impact management over time.

Virtual, global, and cohort-based: This training will take place over three virtual half-day sessions on Zoom, spread over three weeks. In the Live Zoom sessions, you’ll see how to integrate the 4 universal steps of IMM into your practices and explore applying the concepts through case examples. After each session, we’ll ask you to practice applying the strategies and tools to your own organization and share some reflections back to the group, so you will benefit from sharing experiences and challenges with your peer cohort of business leaders.

Led by Duke’s award-winning faculty, globally recognized as leaders in impact management: The training builds on the 20 year expertise of CASE at Duke University, an award-winning research and education center with a mission to prepare leaders and organizations with the business skills needed to achieve lasting social change. The lead instructor is Cathy Clark, Faculty Director of CASE, who in 2020 was named top female faculty influencer in business and society, and in the same year, a thought leader of the year by the World Economic Forum/Schwab Foundation. Cathy brings over 30 years of experience in using business for good.

A hands-on, customized training: CASE recently partnered with the United Nations Development Programme to produce a highly successful online course on the Coursera platform: Impact Measurement and Management for the SDGs. The Coursera course is aimed at those who prefer to learn on their own in a self-paced, independent experience and blends the enterprise and investor perspectives. This ESG and Impact Management for Enterprises course will deepen the instruction from the enterprise perspective, and give you customized attention to applying the steps involved in your own practice. Each week includes a live, highly interactive virtual session with a cohort of enterprise leaders and managers, as well as 30-60 minutes of pre-work and work in between sessions. You will have dedicated time during live sessions to learn from experts, practice using concepts in real world applications, and participate in peer learning and feedback. To maximize the benefit for everyone, participants in this training are expected to attend every session, complete all assignments, and contribute collaboratively in the class and in small groups.

Register here

Training Description:

This course will equip you to:

Align your impact strategy with your core business objectives and the perspectives of your most important stakeholders
Identify and prioritize the most salient material opportunities and risks for the stakeholders of your business
Establish data, reporting, team roles, and systems to measure and manage your ESG and impact targets
Set up rigorous governance practices to make data-driven decisions about the next best actions to improve impact
Report ESG and impact in ways that align with emerging standards and regulations and can be verified by third parties

Approach:

Short preparatory readings and videos to level-set you for the live sessions
Live training delivery on a virtual Zoom platform
Real-life case studies and breakout group work
Open discussion with experienced enterprise leaders and managers
Facilitated sharing of challenges and learnings among peers
Post-session assignments to guide you to implement learnings within your organization

Schedule and Resources:

We will use Zoom for the live sessions, and several interactive tools and breakout rooms to make the online experience as engaging as possible. Participants will have access to Duke’s online learning platform with videos, reading materials, interactive tools, and instructions for homework assignments.

Optional pre-session: April 7, 2022, 9:00-10:00 EST. In order to get to know your peers before the course, we strongly encourage you to take part in this informal session, which will help to “break the Zoom ice” and facilitate working with your peers during the live sessions.
Session 1: April 14, 2022, 9:00-12:30 EST. Learn different approaches to identifying your most important ESG and SDG outcomes. Understand how to use the 5 Dimensions of Impact to articulate the impacts you are targeting.
Session 2: April 21, 2022, 9:00-12:30 EST. Learn how to establish a “data for decision-making mindset” on your team. Classify your goals by the ABC framework to define implications for your measurement and management processes. Explore approaches to integrating these practices into your operations in ways that make sense for your team.
Session 3: April 28, 2022, 9:00-12:30 EST. Learn how to incorporate impact measurement analysis into decision-making processes to improve impact over time. Analyze what makes a good or bad public impact report. Understand how to reinforce your impact goals through advanced governance, reporting, and verification practices.

Who Should Attend:

This course is designed for leaders and managers of any business or organization that wants to improve impact on people and planet. This includes mission-driven organizations (for profit, nonprofit, B corporations) that are seeking specific positive impact, as well as “traditional” organizations that may be looking at ESG or impact considerations for the first time. The training is relevant for organizations of any size – from small enterprises to large multinationals working to impact SDGs or manage ESG factors. Investors, funders, governments, and others working to support enterprises will also find this training useful to better understand the role of enterprises they work with in driving improved impacts on people and planet.

This short video gives a sense of the journey we know enterprises are on and the 4-part structure we’ll be teaching as part of the course.

Faculty Lead:

Cathy Clark, CASE i3 Initiative on Impact Investing at Duke University

Cathy Clark brings over twenty-five years of experience as a successful thought leader, field builder, and educator in impact investing and social entrepreneurship to her role as Faculty Director for the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, in Durham, NC. In 2011, she founded the CASE i3 Initiative on Impact Investing, recognized by the World Economic Forum and the Bridgespan Group as one of the top academic programs on impact investing in the world, and she continues to direct the initiative.

She has a broad portfolio of interests and roles, dovetailing her research and teaching with practitioner-focused, collaborative projects. A former impact investment fund and private foundation manager, who taught at Columbia Business School for a decade before coming to Duke, Cathy’s work has helped thousands of entrepreneurs, investors, intermediaries, and governments around the globe improve their ability to use business as a tool for good.

Since 2014, she has led global projects in collaboration with the USAID Global Development Lab, which include the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke (SEAD), an accelerator working to scale the impact of global health ventures in India and East Africa. Under her co-leadership, SEAD helped early-stage health enterprises, many focused on maternal and child health, raise more than $59 million and improve health outcomes for more than 28 million people in 50 countries. The lessons of that experience drew her to create CASE’s online learning series for entrepreneurs, accelerators and educators, CASE Smart Impact Capital, a 30-hour online training toolkit on impact investing accessed by over 15,000 users in 130 countries, with a 94% satisfaction rate. She is also a co-author of CASE’s #ScalingPathways series for nonprofit social entrepreneurs scaling their impact, in partnership with the Skoll Foundation, USAID, and MercyCorps.

Cathy is the leading academic behind the creation of B Corporations, a movement dedicated to the idea of business as a force for good. She co-authored the survey that over 40,000 global companies have used to measure and improve their impact, receiving the Bill Clark B Champions Award in 2017 for a decade of building the B Corporation movement. She is globally recognized as an expert in impact reporting for impact investing and has also been an active contributor to the Impact Management Project, the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN)’s IRIS standards, and other systemic efforts to improve practices in impact assessment.

Cathy was the sole academic member invited to David Cameron’s G8 Social Impact Investment Taskforce US National Advisory Board and was invited by Obama White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Engagement to track over $1.5 billion in new impact investments in the US. She is a co-author of The Impact Investor: Lessons in Leadership and Strategy for Collaborative Capitalism, which profiled high performing impact funds and their key practices and reached #18 in finance textbooks on Amazon in 2014. She is also a sought-after speaker and board member, and currently serves on several boards and advisory boards, including Self-Help, one of the largest community development finance institutions in the US, B Lab’s Standards Advisory Council, Perella Weinberg’s Agility, rated #1 outsourced CIO for foundations and endowments, Capria, an accelerator for first-time developing market impact funds, and Upstart Co-Lab, which promotes impact investing in the creative economy, among others. Over 300 MBAs have participated in her training and consulting fellowship program in impact investing through CASE i3, and many are working to use impact investing to create lasting change through finance across the globe.

Cathy holds a BA from the University of Virginia and an MBA from Columbia Business School and has published over 25 books, articles, and case studies. She publishes #OnImpact, an online newsletter on impact investing and social innovation read in over 100 countries, and tweets at @cathyhc.

Guest Lecturer:

Dan Vermeer, Center for Energy, Development, and the Global Environment (EDGE) at Duke University

Dan Vermeer is associate professor of the practice and executive director of the Center for Energy, Development, and the Global Environment (EDGE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. As Center Director, Dr. Vermeer develops world-class educational programming, directs research and thought leadership, and builds coalitions around urgent social and environmental challenges. He also teaching classes on energy innovation and sustainability strategy, and collaborates with leading companies and organizations including Bank of America, ABB, NextEra, GM, World Wildlife Fund, DTE Energy, Walmart, NRG, Ingersoll Rand, and other private and public organizations. His areas of expertise include sustainable development, climate change and business strategy, ocean sustainability, water stewardship, food production and waste, and value chain analysis. His latest research is on climate change in the MBA education and the blue (ocean) economy.

Beyond Duke, Dr. Vermeer serves on Sustainability Advisory Board of Ingersoll Rand, and on the corporate boards of the Research Triangle Cleantech Cluster and Conservation X Labs. He also serves on the Award Nominating Committee for the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS), and participates in several innovation-focused multi-stakeholder alliances with USAID, RTI International, and SeaAhead.

Dr. Vermeer joined Duke from The Coca-Cola Company, where he led the Global Water Initiative, an industry-leading effort to protect the company’s primary ingredient. As part of this work, he founded Coca-Cola’s Community Water Partnerships program, resulting in over 500 public-private partnerships in 90+ countries, and designed a industry-leading methodology for measuring risks across Coca-Cola’s global manufacturing facilities. During his tenure at Coca-Cola, he also launched the company’s Sustainable Agriculture program to manage lifecycle impacts of agricultural supply chain inputs, and led the Sustainable Value Chain initiative to embed sustainability across business functions, including finance, strategy, operations, marketing, and procurement.

Dr. Vermeer plays a leading public role in advocating for business sustainability through speaking, research, and institution-building. He is the founder and chief architect of the Global Water Challenge, a multi-partner organization for innovative water and sanitation initiatives, co-author of the CEO Water Mandate (signed by more than 140 global companies), and lead contributor to several policy documents issued through the World Economic Forum, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the United Nations Foundation. He holds a Masters degree from the University of Virginia and Ph.D. from Northwestern University.

Reserve Your Spot:

Early Bird Rate (January 1-31): $1,900
Advanced Rate (February 1-28): $2,400
Regular Rate (March 1-31): $2,600

Click here to be notified of next program dates

Cancellation policy: If after registering you are no longer able to attend the program, you may:

Transfer your registration to another person from your organization up to April 4, 2022. After this date we cannot accept transfers.
Cancel your registration and receive a 50% refund if cancellation is requested by March 31, 2022. No refunds are available after this date.

Additional questions? Email carrie.gonnella@duke.edu