Coca-Cola social impact framework toolkit

Challenge

The Coca-Cola System* in Europe has an ambitious social impact objective to ‘equip those facing barriers in the labour market with the skills they need to succeed in the next decade, ensuring no one is left behind’. It needed expert support to measure its progress and impact against this goal in a consistent way across different markets and programmes.

SLR's ESG Advisory team were selected to work with Coca-Cola because of our 25 years+ social impact experience and aligning our approach with in-house expertise of best practice through Business for Societal Impact (B4SI) – the global standard for social impact measurement.

*Coca-Cola System refers to The Coca-Cola Company and its bottling entities Coca-Cola Hellenic and Coca-Cola Europacific Partners.

Solution

We supported Coca-Cola to develop a tailored social impact framework that would enable them to measure progress against their goals in a robust way and better understand and communicate the impact they are delivering.

To do this, we conducted a detailed mapping of key community programmes to understand areas of focus, current beneficiaries and existing measurement practices. We engaged with community leads across the business to stress-test our proposed framework.

We also undertook research to further define the focus of Coca-Cola’s headline social impact goal, looking at aspects such as key barriers to employment and the skills needed by the labour market for the next decade.

Impact

The social impact framework and toolkit we developed provides practical guidance and tools (including a data Capture Tool) to improve measurement and track progress against Coca Cola’s skills goal. The framework was supported by a training webinar for community leads, enabling them to work with partners to capture better impact data for reporting and communications as well as drive more impactful programmes.

We have now begun the next phase of work with Coca-Cola to support the implementation of the Framework with its internal community leaders and charity partners and ensure data collected is robust and can stand up to external scrutiny.

“Thanks to this toolkit we will be able to report against our society target, using the same methodology across 29 markets and more than 25 different skills development programmes and involving diverse community partners. This methodology provides us with the rigour and flexibility that we need to ensure robust social impact storytelling.”

Belén de Coca Mayoral, Senior Manager Sustainability & Community Partnerships for Coca-Cola Europacific Partners