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Making Social Impact Reporting Matter
Audette Exel AO, Chair of Adara Group, explains how to balance metrics with storytelling in social impact reporting for effective board governance.
Richard Conway
Sep 14, 2025
"There is enormous risk when you try to metricise the value of a human life."
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Audette Exel AO about the need for boards to transform social impact reporting from a compliance afterthought into a strategic board tool. Audette brings a unique dual perspective to this conversation—as Chair and Founder of Adara Group, which delivers health and education services in some of the world's most remote places, and as a former Director of major Australian financial institutions including Westpac and Suncorp.
With mandatory climate reporting now driving sophisticated environmental oversight across Australian organisations, the social component of ESG reporting is underdeveloped. This governance gap presents both risks and opportunities for boards genuinely committed to stakeholder value creation.
Why Social Impact Reporting Lags Behind Environmental Reporting
Audette describes social impact reporting as "nascent" compared to environmental reporting for understandable practical reasons. "The E also lends itself to data measurement perhaps more easily than the S," she notes, highlighting why boards naturally focused on environmental metrics first as regulatory frameworks developed.
Environmental reporting benefits from established measurement standards, third-party verification processes, and increasingly clear regulatory requirements. Social impact measurement, by contrast, requires more nuanced approaches that balance quantitative accountability with qualitative insights about human outcomes.
The Dangerous Metrics Trap in Human Services
One of Audette's key insights concerned the risks of reducing human services delivery to mere numbers. Drawing from her experience governing organisations that serve vulnerable populations, she warns about "enormous risk when you try to metricise the value of a human life."
This isn't theoretical concern. Audette explains how performance-driven approaches can create perverse outcomes in social service delivery. Organisations focused solely on serving maximum numbers might abandon remote communities because urban service delivery is more "efficient". This fails to account for fundamental human rights- access to healthcare, education, and clean drinking water - regardless of location or service delivery costs.
For boards overseeing organisations with social impact components, this represents a fundamental governance challenge: maintaining accountability and measuring performance without losing sight of human dignity and rights-based approaches.
Moving Social Impact Beyond Friday Afternoon Agendas
Perhaps Audette's most pointed critique involves how boards typically handle social impact discussion. She describes the common scenario where social impact gets relegated to "Friday afternoon when you're exhausted, and you've just spent three days going around the clock, and everybody wants to run out the door to catch their aeroplane."
This scheduling reflects a deeper governance problem: treating social impact as "soft stuff" rather than recognising it as critical business strategy. Audette argues that effective social impact work "improves your bottom line, attracts better staff, retains your staff, and has this really powerful impact on your wider stakeholder group, including on the community."
Company Secretaries play a crucial role in elevating social impact discussion by ensuring it receives prime agenda time during board meetings when directors are engaged and focused. This isn't just about scheduling - it's about signalling board priorities.
The Power of Experiential Governance
Audette emphasised the need for directors to witness their organisation's social impact firsthand. "You need to get out there and see it," she insists, explaining that direct experience fundamentally changes both individual directors and organisational culture.
"There is no question that when you bring it home for yourself and you sort of open yourself up to that, outside of just the intellectual experience, to the wider experience, not only are you forever changed and enriched, but your organisation is gonna be forever changed and enriched."
Balancing Data with Storytelling in Board Reporting
Rather than rejecting metrics entirely, Audette advocates for a balance between rigorous measurement and meaningful narrative. "We need the data, we need to understand it. We need to figure out the messages, and then we need to tell each other stories," she explains.
This balanced approach starts with establishing what Audette calls a "theory of change"—working backwards from desired outcomes to identify necessary interventions and measurement points. However, board reporting must extend beyond spreadsheets to include human stories that illustrate both program impact and implementation challenges.
Creating Accountability Without Losing Humanity
The ultimate challenge for social impact governance lies in creating accountability systems that drive performance improvement without falling into the metrics trap. Audette describes how this requires boards to avoid both superficial "feel good" storytelling and reductive number-chasing.
Audette predicts that social impact reporting will eventually develop the same third-party verification standards and global best practices that now characterise environmental reporting. Until those standards emerge, boards must create rigorous approaches that navigate between accountability and humanity.
Richard Conway is the founder of boardcycle, the board meeting platform designed for Company Secretaries. Create, manage and automate your board agendas, run sheets, shell minutes, action tracking and more with boardcycle CoSec.
[00:00:00] In this episode, host Richard Conway talks to Audette Exel, Chair and Founder of the Adara Group, and former Director of Westpac and Suncorp, about board reporting and monitoring of social impact.
[00:00:14] Richard Conway: Hello and welcome to Minutes by boardcycle. I'm your host, Richard Conway and today I'm joined by Audette Exel. Audette, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:23] Audette: Thank you, Richard. Delighted to be here.
[00:00:25] Richard Conway: So, Audette is the Chair and Founder of Adara group, an organisation that uniquely pairs a business arm, Adara Partners, which provides advisory services with a for-purpose arm, Adara Development, which is focused on providing health and education services to people living in some of the world's remotest places, including Nepal and Uganda.
[00:00:45] Richard Conway: Audette is also an experienced non-executive director, having sat on the boards of Suncorp and Westpac. And today, Audette kindly agreed to talk to me a little bit about board reporting and oversight of social impact.
[00:00:59] Richard Conway: So, Audette, to open up: we're now seeing mandatory climate reporting coming into play for many organisations here in Australia, which means that, coupled with their existing reporting requirements, they need to monitor and report on both environments. So the E and governance, so the G.
[00:01:18] Richard Conway: But there doesn't really seem to me to be an equivalent requirement about the S in ESG, which is social. So, to start off with, I wanted to ask you whether you think social impact is well monitored by or reported to boards in Australia today?
[00:01:33] Audette: Right. You're touching on a really, really important point. I think I would describe the S part of ESG in this country as kind of nascent in terms of the reporting side and you can understand why the world and major corporations around the world are focused on the E first, 'cause it's a critical imperative, as we are now living and facing into climate change in a quite a frightening way.
[00:01:56] Audette: The E also lends itself to data measurement perhaps more easily than the S. So if you pick up sustainability reports, which I continue to improve, your question is borne out. You see that E is a huge part of ESG.
[00:02:11] Audette: So, thinking about S for a second and social - like all things that we report on, it comes back to you know, what are the outcomes and what are the KPIs we are looking for? Some of this flips into G as well, but loosely, whether we're looking at gender pay equity, we're looking at community investment, we're looking at volunteer hours, we're looking at diversity metrics, we're looking at how we manage our suppliers.
[00:02:31] Audette: That's one set of metrics and there are a number of helpful metrics that can be used and I believe should be used. The other thing I'd just say is that, companies that actually are really serious in the space tie what they do on the S to the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals.
[00:02:48] Audette: So, in Adara for instance, we report against a number of them: SDG 1, which is no poverty; SDG 3, which is good health and wellbeing; SDG 5 is gender equality; SDG 10, has reduced inequality; and SDG 17 one that I particularly love 'cause I work in this kind of hybrid, across in this hybrid manner, a partnership for the goal.
[00:03:07] Audette: So when you start to see companies starting to tie to that. The other place that I like to see, and I think that we need to keep moving our companies towards, including the biggest companies, as standards start to formulate underneath the E into the S, is the ten principles of the UN Global Compact.
[00:03:24] Audette: They're high-level principles, but it's another way to kind of start that process of measurement.
[00:03:30] Audette: So yes, we've got a long way to go. I think standards will come together in the way they did with E. I think we'll start to see third party verification of standards, and we will start to see global best practice form. And that will be a very, very good thing. Following on from what we've done on E. And we know how much more work we've gotta do there.
[00:03:48] Richard Conway: Absolutely. And so Audette, you've talked about, many different metrics which could potentially be used, or objective ways of judging social impact that companies could track there. Do you think there's a risk around social impact reporting becoming too metrics focused, given that ultimately, it's about people and a human element?
[00:04:09] Audette: Richard, I really like this question. I think that particularly when you're dealing with human social services delivery. Particularly when you're seeing business believing that its metrics, you know, translate across different sectors, there is enormous risk when you try to metricise, the value of a human life, for instance. The amount of time it takes for you to get someone to an, into employment and the perverse outcomes that happen when you do that. And you know, I've seen this in all these years of working on the ground, can become frightening.
[00:04:43] Audette: So, I'll give you an example of that. You know, when we first started to metricise rewarding employment agencies that got unemployed people back to work – now you’d think that that was a totally obvious - the more of them they get back to work, the better. The faster they get back to work, the better.
[00:04:59] Audette: But what nobody seemed to think about in the early days was what does that mean for the long term unemployed? What does that mean for people that are struggling with mental health or addiction issues in any format? The hard client groups. What does that mean for them?
[00:05:14] Audette: Well, if you are incenting businesses on the basis of how fast they can churn and lift, what that actually means for hard client groups is it's not profitable to look after them.
[00:05:26] Audette: So, you know, there is an underlying, an underpinning piece in human social service delivery in particular. And maybe this, this is across all sectors where you're trying to affect change, where you need not just to be thinking about the metrics that give you short- and medium-term return or impact, but the metrics that give you, metrics or the ways of measurement, that give you long-term return.
[00:05:51] Audette: The other thing I'd say on that question. Which is such a good question, bang for the buck, is the other argument that drives me crazy. So, one of the reasons Adara works remotely is that there's a bang for the buck argument, which is a metrics argument, that is run about why you only provide service in urban settings because you get more, you could touch more people.
[00:06:10] Audette: But it's completely neglecting the concept of the human rights of people who don't live in urban settings. Their right to good healthcare, good education, clean drinking water. And all the other fundamental rights that we take for granted in our society - we leave those groups completely behind.
[00:06:29] Audette: We also don't take into account the incredible value that some of those communities and people that stopping urban drift, you know, the amazing people that come out of those communities, that if we were just driven by, well, you know, you could provide service to 200,000 in a city and, but if you try and do it in a remote area, you have to walk for 25 days.
[00:06:51] Audette: If we are just driven by that, we are missing something really critical for our world. So, really, really good question. And I wish, I wish more people would ask that question before they leap to judgment on what's going on with service delivery across that whole spectrum.
[00:07:08] Richard Conway: Absolutely. And I guess I'm gonna ask you now somewhat the opposite question, which is that if you don't metricise the data too much, then it can go into this territory of kind of "feel good" stories, I suppose. And so what's the approach that you take at Adara to be able to balance between metrics-based reporting but understanding human impact and human outcomes as well, without sort of drifting into that "feel good" territory?
[00:07:37] Audette: Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it? It's not a binary. I mean, we are living in a world where everybody's going to polarity and binaries. But let's sit with it out of the binary and in this, the nuanced conversation in the middle.
[00:07:47] Audette: First of all, on the binary, I'd say feeling good is not such a bad thing. I had a journalist say to me not too long ago, "Well, we can't just tell good stories, Audette." And I was like, "Well, why the hell not?" We need that in a world that seems to be feeding into us despair, and feeling hopeless and helpless.
[00:08:02] Audette: But put that aside for a second. You're quite right. How do we make this substantive? Which is really the question, right? How do we ensure the work is substantive and impactful if we acknowledge that metrics aren't the only way to measure it?
[00:08:16] Audette: So the way that we think about that at Adara is, first, no question - our work has landed in data, in monitoring and evaluation teams. We try to work really hard to understand what's going on. We start, as many NGOs do, with a theory of change, and in fact, I think businesses should too.
[00:08:34] Audette: You start with a theory of change and then you work your way backwards from the theory of change to figure out what the interventions are that will get you to where you need to go. And you figure out what the key outcomes, your outputs, and your outcome measurements are, your KPIs, if you like. That's deep in the organisation now, because we're a longer serving organisation.
[00:08:52] Audette: So you start with the data. What you do then is try to really understand it. Open your mind to understanding: why could that be? Is that about health seeking behaviour? Is that about the way that the community are feeling about a certain intervention? Is that about a political issue? A religious issue? A gender issue? You ground yourself in the data. You work really hard to understand it.
[00:09:12] Audette: And for us, we look at what our message is. What's this data trying to tell us? What's the message it's giving? And then, you know, when I'm talking about it, or one of us is on a stage somewhere, you know, one of our, our leaders or talking about it, we always also try to ground it in a story.
[00:09:32] Audette: One of the things I found so interesting is, I can stand on a stage right now and tell you about devastating and catastrophic consequences of what's happening with USAID, PEPFAR, Gavi, and the World Health Organisation withdrawals by the United States of America.
[00:09:50] Audette: I could talk to you about the 14 to 18 million people who will die of HIV/AIDS by the end of this decade, entirely preventable deaths, I can tell you that. But what I can see in your eyes when I start talking like that, I can talk the data, it passes across.
[00:10:07] Audette: But if I tell you a story of how I was sitting on the ground when I was in Uganda in May, and I could tell you what the data is showing us about mother to child transmission. And then I can tell you a story about a young mum that I was just talking about who's been fully suppressed from HIV/AIDS since she was a tiny child, and now she finds herself at risk of running out of the meds, and when she has her next child, suddenly again, the chances are that she's gonna pass that terrible disease to her child without that being necessary, then I'll bring it home.
[00:10:44] Audette: So, I think in life maybe we need all of that. We need the data, we need to understand it. We need to figure out the messages, and then we need to tell each other stories because, you know, as First Nations people will tell us, storytelling is some of the most important ways that we have to learn as human beings, and we mustn't neglect that.
[00:11:04] Richard Conway: Audette, many things stuck with me from what you just said. But one thing that came out to me there is that, as a Chair, as someone who's overseeing Adara Group, you are getting out there and actually going to these places as well. So I wanted to ask you how important you see that as a way for a board or the governance of an organisation to really understand the data that's getting reported, understand what's getting reported to them, bring it to life, both in that kind of human way, but also just understanding what the data really means.
[00:11:37] Audette: Yeah, so, so important. I mean, you're touching on something so critical. Particularly when we start talking about how you make change in really, really significant, large, possibly global organisations. It's so easy to find yourself in the oak-panelled boardroom, so far away from the reality of what you’re meant to be talking about.
[00:11:58] Audette: It's so easy for your team, who are desperate to make sure that you know the market's gonna reward them for this month's, quarters, or year's earnings, to put what they consider to be the "soft stuff" at the end of the agenda on a Friday afternoon when you're exhausted, and you've just spent three days going around the clock, and everybody wants to run out the door to catch their aeroplane.
[00:12:21] Audette: And so, from a board perspective or a chair perspective, as you lead a board. First of all, understand yourself, this matters. This is not soft stuff. This is critical stuff. This is stuff that actually improves your bottom line, attracts better staff, retains your staff, and has this really powerful impact on your wider stakeholder group, including on the community.
[00:12:43] Audette: It's not soft. So you need to upskill yourself. You need to treat it very seriously. You need to give it the time and space in your agendas.
[00:12:52] Audette: And you need to get out there and see it. Because there is no question that when you bring it home for yourself and you sort of open yourself up to that ,outside of just the intellectual experience, to the wider experience, not only are you forever changed and enrich, but your organisation is gonna be forever changed and enriched.