Social Impact, what is it and can we do it?
What is it? A significant, positive change that addresses a pressing social challenge.
Can we do it? Creating social impact is the result of a deliberate set of activities with a goal matching definition above.
The point about the social part of the phrase is that the impact has to be focused on creating change and supporting what we can all agree on to benefit human on the planet. By definition it’s an impact on something we care about.
Today many people want to work for companies create social impact. I get that. On our web site we have (had) a page on social impact and when I put this page up I believed that part of what we did was good things and I wanted to shout about them. Show we had a heart and wasn’t like other insurance companies.
However over the last few months I have been reviewing our efforts about social impact and I got to thinking….
We are an insurance company. Surely everything we do as an industry has a social impact? A conscious insurance company fully focus on its social impact and responsibility, is this the definition of social impact? Isn’t insurance the ultimate social impact service?
Is this true today? Much of the ‘western’ focused insurance effort is fully focused on addressing companies and people that MUST buy insurance to fulfil a contract obligation or to spread risk from their balance sheet or to mitigate risk in buying something. Their audience focus is top earning people or companies. Globally this represents the top 3%, companies in the top 30,000 out of the 100 million or so companies and top 200,000,000 people out of the general population of over 7 billion. This audience represents where a majority of insurance is sold globally by value. If there is social impact it is totally focused on the few not the masses. It’s where the top brokers and insurers are focused. Therefore, they is very little social impact generated by the general insurance industry.
What about the rest of the planet’s people and businesses? They are looking for social impact but they buy very little insurance, this I believe is the opportunity. The opportunity to discover why they don’t buy and then to deliver service and products to them to make insurance relevant and easy for them to participate in and to release the benefits of insurance to them and their community.
This is why I have taken our ‘social impact’ page down. We are social impact. Our message is that our services and products help you and your community in your time of need. We help the community recover quickly when things happen. This is our social impact. Providing a safety net to allow people to recover quickly is our way of providing social impact. Delivering social impact is through the core of our business and buried in our DNA.
MIC Global provides its social impact most visibly through the payment of claims; however, the purchase of the policy is equally important as this is where the community is built. When people take out a policy, they are supporting themselves and the community in equal measure. The act of buying a policy enables the customer to do things with the risk covered for themselves, their business and their family. This could be going on a long trip or taking a loan out to grow or protecting their property. The policy covers the risk and allows progress of the person, business, family and their community. The act of buying the policy builds up a premium pot in MIC, this allows us to pay claims when unfortunate things happen to our customers.
The payment of claims is especially important to us and we try to pay claims very quickly. The way we do this is to make it clear what is needed when the policy is taken out and then we track claims activity every day. On some our programs we even contact customers to make sure they are making claims if we think they should be. Creating social impact is what drives our company – the bigger the impact we make the more successful our products are. The result is positive economic activity and protection of that activity when things happen. The result is that a community grows in wealth and security over time.
