Global Impact Player Paul Katz Talks About Measuring Impact - Paul Katz

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The CEO and Founder of Entertain Impact Says Measuring ROI Is Easy Compared to Impact

Paul Katz, CEO and founder of Entertain Impact, describes his business as a “social impact agency, and we use popular culture for social change.”

Polio Eradication

Some of Paul’s big wins have been working with Rotary International and the Gates Foundation on polio eradication. Impact Entertainment developed the “We’re this close” campaign that engaged public figures around the world, signaling just how close we are to eradicating polio.

This global campaign featured South Korea’s Psy, who gained fame for his worldwide hit Gangnam style.

Bill Gates also participated. (Bill was a guest on this show to discuss polio eradication.)

Archie Panjabi, who starred in The Good Wife, also participated. (She was a guest on this show as a formal part of her work on this effort.)

“If we can eradicate polio, it will be the only second human disease we’ve ever done after—I think smallpox was the first,” Paul notes.

The work wasn’t strictly limited to influencers. “We did some cool activities, activations, including what became a Guinness Book of World Records [record], where we had a certain number of influencers, whether it was Jane Goodall or it was a soccer player or an actor or whomever, just say ‘We’re this close.’ We eventually had, I think, over 130,000 people upload.”

Paul says the goal isn’t really in the activity. “What you’re looking for is down the line is the impact.”

Still thinking of polio, he lists the sort of questions he asks to determine whether the outreach has had an impact:

Does that have a bearing on persuading governments to continue the programs?

Does it give people in the field, the field workers, the very brave ones, especially in that corner where they’re under threat—does it give them more motivation?

Do they get pride from seeing this, that they’re acknowledged?

Measurement

“There are two different types of measurement,” Paul says. “There’s the financial. Did you get a good return on investment? That’s fairly easy to do.”

“The social return on investment, which is what I’m very interested in—it’s very difficult to measure that, but it’s much, much better than it was ten years ago,” he says. “You can measure it in different ways.”

By way of example, he offers, “We were doing a campaign for Europe where which gets people who have kind of graduated high school but haven’t launched yet. It gets them internships and trains them. About 80% of them get jobs.”

Of his firm’s work, he says, “We have to be very careful to be accurate and credible in what we measure.” The thought applies almost universally to those working on and measuring impact.

“If you take the Rotary campaign and the partners, you can say we were just the grain of sand on the beach of this,” Paul says. “I don’t want to overstate it, but you can say they and polio are gone from Africa, and they’re gone from India. So that’s the big, big impacts that we’re a very small part of.”

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