Launching our new website: Communicating impact and inspiring vision

Chris Jansen, Marty Anderson, Fi Deehan

August 31st, 2024

Launching our new website: Communicating impact and inspiring vision

Leadership Lab is an impact-focused leadership consultancy working across Aotearoa for the last 11 years. Over this time, we have curated hundreds of impact stories and shared them freely through our website, social media and pānui (newsletter). Over the last 18 months, we have finetuned this into an Impact Strategy implemented by our Impact team members Fi Deehan, Marty Anderson, Erica Austin, Libby Davenport, Stephen McConnachie, Chris Jansen and Wiki Kurene.

This Impact Strategy was informed by an in-depth kōrero back in December 2022 which culminated in a pretty messy but incredible hand-drawn diagram of our ‘impact communication eco-system’. Since then, we’ve come a long way from that map as here we are, excitedly sharing with you our new Leadership Lab website and recently announcing that we have become BCorp certified. As part of this process, we identified that our purpose for communicating our impact with the world is primarily to:
#1 Scale our impact by sharing our learning and approaches so that others can also create an impact towards the same vision (equitable and flourishing communities and organisations).
Two secondary reasons included:
#2 Accountability to funders (reporting based on the outcomes we have focussed on)
#3 Increased visibility and credibility (so we become more well known for what we do, and we create opportunities for new work, which also enables us to create opportunities for our team members.)

We engaged Marty Anderson from Outside the Square Creative soon after we started in 2013, and he has provided a high level of strategic advice and communication support over the last ten years. In particular, Marty worked with us to design and build our first website in 2013 and then again to build our current website in the last 12 months. www.leadershiplab.co.nz Marty has also provided ongoing graphic design and communication for all our initiatives and programmes – a huge volume of small projects over these ten years. https://leadershiplab.co.nz/projects/

Over the last 12 months, Fi and Chris have worked closely with Marty to refresh our website completely. The brief was to make it more reflective of our Pou Herenga (our guiding beliefs and values), to better articulate our whakapapa, the impact we want to have on the world, and to make our incredible library of resources more accessible to all.

The green weave section below summarises the essential essence of who we are at Leadership Lab. We are intentionally a Tiriti o Waitangi-led, impact-focused leadership consultancy where we grow leaders to develop an equitable and flourishing Aotearoa. In all of this work, we are guided by our values: Mana ōrite, Kotahitanga, and Manaakitanga.

Leadership Lab has looked very closely at what we mean by an ‘equitable and flourishing Aotearoa’ and decided on the following five impact areas to focus `the growth of our leaders on. These impact areas permeate our entire organisation and guide our decision-making, budgeting, programme design, and evaluation. Examples of each of the five impact areas are explained here.

The Resources section is directly aligned with our primary reason for communicating our impact: to scale our impact by sharing our learning and approaches so that others can also create an impact towards the same vision. Leadership Lab has an aspirational vision for ‘equitable and flourishing communities and organisations’ in Aotearoa, New Zealand. We recognise that we can never reach that vision alone, and we make all our resources available so you can contribute to this vision in your own way. That’s what collective impact means to us.

Check out all resources here.

Marty shares some of his reflections on where we’ve come from:

“In 2014, Leadership Lab was still in its infancy; the website was designed to grow, with information, photos and videos, but without a history. In 2024, the collective has grown, the focus has become clearer, and the need to be intentional about their mahi has become critical. With clear areas of impact, and under the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Leadership Lab has justifiably forged a reputation for its purpose-driven approaches, knowing that they work while managing the wellbeing of all involved.”

Marty has profiled our website development on his own website, providing an insightful perspective from a designer’s perspective. https://www.outsidethesquare.net.nz/leadership-lab

Over to Marty for the final words:
“We’ll continue to ensure the site is authentic, reflects the mahi we do, and draws people in to discover the ‘stories’ and the ‘real impact’ that the Leadership Lab team have been facilitating. That would be epic!”

So if you have any feedback, let us know.

You can read more stories of impact as well as thought-provoking pieces from across our Leadership Lab ecosystem by signing up for this monthly pānui (see bottom of www.leadershiplab.co.nz) or by connecting with us on our Leadership Lab LinkedIn and Facebook . Thanks heaps for your interest.

Chris Jansen, Marty Anderson, Fi Deehan

August 31st, 2024