Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast out, it helps more people find the show and spread the message of having a positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I'm really excited to introduce you to Sona Khalsa.

And our topic is the business impact of social impact. Sona is the chief impact officer at Benevity, has worked with mission driven organizations for over fifteen years. As chief impact officer, she is responsible for infusing impact into Benevity's business and culture and overseeing the company's own impact and inclusion initiatives. At the helm of Benevity Impact Labs, an incubator and resource hub, Sona and her team bring cutting edge data research and insights and best practices to help organizations and individuals maximize their impact and authentically live their purpose. As host of Benevity's podcast, Speaking of Purpose, she interviews top ESG, impact, culture, DEI, and b leaders who are focused on using business as a force for good. Sona, welcome to the AwarePreneur's podcast.

Thank you so much for having me, Paul. Happy to be here.

Thrilled to dive into the, like, more tactical aspects of impact. I was so excited about this interview as I was doing my homework. Like, everybody likes to throw those words around, but we're gonna gonna get into some real granular, like, how do you all define it and how do you measure it? Before I do that, just to kind of flesh out your background a little bit, that's a very impressive bio. But if there was something you wanted to give somebody a little more texture to your background, Sonja, what would somebody wanna know about you and what you bring to this conversation about impact and measurement and metrics and getting more granular about the dent we're making in the impact universe?

That's a great question, Paul. So, I mean, I guess I would say a few things. One is I did not start my career in data measurement impact. I've accidentally ended up here. I started my career as a writer, accidentally ended up in a marketing career, which I then pivoted out of about four years ago when I became chief impact officer at Benevity. I think I'd say I, I feel like I discovered like the jackpot of jobs when I realized that you could find a role in a company that's all about using capitalism for good and, you know, giving corporate resources out to the world to improve the world. But as part of the part of that role, we ended up spinning up this social innovation lab. And part of what we do is bring data and research.

And so I became really involved in bringing, you know, more data research and insights, to the community. And so now the last four years I've spent my whole kind of role just focused on being immersed in the data and understanding how to measure what I think is one of the hardest things to measure is social impact. And so it's been a super fun journey. And so I kinda feel like I can bring, you know, like that neophyte's eyes. Right? Looks just like, I'm not an expert by any means, but so I've still got kind of some fresh eyes, but I do I have spent the last four years thinking about it and enabling it. So hopefully hopefully your listeners will kind of relate a little bit.

Awesome. And you have some great tips for us that we'll get into a little bit. Just to give people a sense of who Benevity is working, if you go to the site, you see some logos of some companies that might be a little bit familiar. Like, give us a sense of who you all are working with so that our listeners get a sense that these are fairly scaled enterprises that are trying to figure out social enterprise. Is that social impact and how to measure it? Is that fair to say?

Absolutely fair to say. It's you know, Benevity is not a household name. But so we're the software that helps large enterprise companies, a lot of fortune 1,000 companies power what we call their corporate purpose programs. So that's basically how they do good in the world, whether that is through making grants to nonprofits, whether that is engaging their employees in donation matching campaigns or crisis relief campaigns or volunteering or taking social environmental action or, enabling their employee resources, resource groups to come together through our tech platform, as well as enabling their consumers to, you know, round up their purchases to make a donation to a nonprofit. So Benevity is the software that powers that. And, yeah, we've got incredible, set of clients, you know, from Microsoft and Starbucks and, you know, like you name it. If you drink it, if you wear it, if you've seen it, if you, you know, it's probably a company that Benevity works with. So we feel really privileged to power, you know, the the programs.