Ask a company what it’s doing for society, and there’s a good chance the answer is still a photo: a tree being planted, a check being handed over, a volunteer day captured for the annual report. That used to be enough. It isn’t anymore. Leaders, investors and employees don’t just want to hear that a company meant well. They want proof something actually changed, and they want to check the numbers themselves.
That’s a real shift in what “doing good” is supposed to deliver. A tree planted is an activity. Whether it survives, whether the community around it is better off, whether the problem it was meant to solve still exists five years later, that’s impact. Increasingly, it’s the only version of the story anyone’s interested in.
Trust doesn’t come from a campaign
Trust is harder to earn than it used to be, and younger audiences are quick to spot the gap between what a brand says and what it does. Credibility can’t just be claimed. It must show up consistently, over time, in ways that don’t rely on one campaign to carry the whole story. What builds trust is a pattern: initiatives that connect to what the business already does, sustained long enough to show results, reported on honestly, including the parts that didn’t go as planned.
That same logic applies to staying quiet. APCO’s own research backs this up: in a June 2026 Pulse Check survey of U.S. consumers, only 17 percent said they don’t typically notice when a company goes silent during a major news event. Everyone else reads something into it, whether that’s discipline, fear of backlash or tacit agreement, and which reading they land on splits sharply along political lines. Staying quiet isn’t a way to sit a moment out. It’s just another choice that gets interpreted, for better or worse.
This is where a lot of organisations get stuck, and it’s rarely about intent. The obstacles tend to be structural. Social impact sits outside the boardroom instead of inside it. Teams know they should track outcomes but don’t have consistent ways to do it. The initiative lives next to the business strategy instead of inside it. Skip these, and even a well-funded programmes ends up as a pile of disconnected activities rather than something coherent.
What this looks like
The organisations getting it right tend to share a few habits. They build social initiatives out of what the business already does well, rather than importing something generic. Take a global logistics carrier that had run employee giving programmes for decades but was watching participation flatten. Instead of launching something new, it went back to its own workforce first, running surveys and focus groups to find out how people wanted to give and volunteer, rather than assuming. That led to a new digital giving platform, paid volunteer time off, grants tied to volunteer hours and employer gift matching, all rolled out through an internal campaign reaching more than 400,000 employees. The mechanics changed. The purpose didn’t have to.
A biotech company took a different route to the same principle. Rather than adopting an off-the-shelf environmental, social and governance (ESG) framework, it had its 12 material issues independently benchmarked against real peers, then sat down with its own executive committee to find out where their ambitions exceeded where the company stood today. That gap, not a generic checklist, became the basis for a three-year roadmap.
These organisations also treat transparency as a habit, not a talking point. They publish enough detail on funding and outcomes that someone else could check their math. And they think in systems rather than projects. A single scholarship changes one life; a programme that reshapes how a sector trains and hires changes the odds for everyone who comes after. The second kind takes longer and doesn’t fit neatly into one campaign, but it’s still standing after the news cycle moves on.
The same Pulse Check found the reward for that kind of consistency: 72 per cent of Americans said they respect companies that held to their existing practices and commitments even under political pressure, a rare point of agreement that holds up across party lines. Bending under pressure doesn’t earn goodwill so much as spend it.
So what’s the test?
None of this makes social impact easier. A poorly measured, poorly governed initiative is now a liability rather than a harmless nice-to-have, and stakeholders are getting better at telling the difference. But for organisations willing to run social impact with the same discipline they’d apply to any other part of the business, the payoff is real: trust that holds up under scrutiny, at a moment when very little else does.
Most companies could still be asked to produce the receipts behind their last social impact claim and come up short. That’s the gap the next few years of this work will be spent closing.
By Christophe Guibeleguiet, Head of Sustainability and Social Impact Practice – MENA, APCO
