Social Purpose Strategy

A social investor discovered their organisational purpose and used it to reshape their positioning strategy, engagement strategy and service offering - turning purpose into the foundation for everything they do.

Nominet Trust (now Social Tech Trust) is a social investor funded by Nominet, the UK's internet names registry. They take a proportion of Nominet's surplus and invest it in social enterprises using the internet to create positive change.

As a young organisation, Nominet Trust had enormous potential but hadn't yet found the right way to express it. Their purpose was real but undefined. Several challenges flowed from this:

No clear organisational purpose to guide decisions or set direction

• A service offering - their grant and funding approach - that was harder to navigate than it needed to be
• Unclear positioning strategy in a growing social investment landscape

Limited understanding of how to connect with potential investees and stakeholder groups through an effective engagement strategy

Without a clearly articulated purpose, energy went into activity rather than being guided by a shared understanding of why the organisation existed. They needed a strategy rooted in social purpose that would bring coherence to everything from how they made investment decisions to how they communicated with the outside world.

Nominet Trust wanted to build a social purpose strategy that would become the foundation for everything they did. Not just a statement for the website, but a living social purpose strategy that would shape decisions, clarify their positioning strategy, strengthen their engagement strategy, and refine their service offering.

The goal was to move from undefined purpose to one where organisational purpose drove strategy, and strategy shaped everything else. Research by McKinsey found that people who live their purpose at work are more productive, more resilient, and more likely to stay - but the gap between leadership and frontline staff in experiencing that purpose is vast. For Nominet Trust, bridging that gap meant making purpose visible and practical across every level of the organisation.

The work began where any genuine strategy rooted in social purpose should - with the people.

Starting with individual purpose

Rather than developing a purpose in a boardroom, the project started by exploring why each individual within the Trust did what they did. Understanding organisational purpose meant first understanding personal purpose. Through individual exploration, the team uncovered their own motivations and beliefs - creating the raw material for an authentic purpose rather than one designed by committee.

Building shared purpose through workshops

This individual work fed into collaborative workshops with the whole team and trustees. The workshops explored every aspect of the organisation - its service offering, positioning strategy, strategic direction and audiences. Having trustees involved alongside staff meant the strategy emerged from the full breadth of the organisation's experience and perspective.

Research into current audiences and potential investees ran alongside the workshops. This gave the team genuine insight into how they were perceived and what their audiences actually needed - essential groundwork for a social purpose strategy that would hold up in practice.

Creating a framework to drive everything

From these workshops, a distinctive framework emerged - a Belief, Purpose and Intent structure that expressed the organisation's social purpose at three connected levels:

A belief about the world - what Nominet Trust collectively believed about the internet's power for social good

• A purpose drawn from that belief - the specific mission the Trust would pursue

An intent that made the purpose actionable - a concrete commitment to their unique role as a social investor and catalyst

This wasn't a mission statement exercise. Each layer built on the one before, creating a social purpose strategy that connected deeply held beliefs to practical direction. The purpose wasn't invented - it was uncovered from what people already believed and then given a structure that made it useful.

Turning purpose into practical tools

The purpose then cascaded outward into tangible deliverables. The work produced a comprehensive foundations document - a practical working tool covering principles, personality, tone of voice, audience engagement guidance and communication structure. This gave every team member the tools to make their social purpose visible in daily work.

The service offering was refined around the new clarity - making it easier for potential partners to understand what the Trust offered. The positioning strategy crystallised into a clear market position: "social investment for social impact." And the engagement strategy was shaped by detailed understanding of different audience needs - from board members to research partners to strategic allies - each requiring a different approach but all rooted in the same organisational purpose.

Nominet Trust gained something more lasting than a new brand. They gained a social purpose strategy that became the operating foundation for the whole organisation.

The Belief-Purpose-Intent framework became a touchstone for decisions. When someone needed to assess a potential investment, judge whether a communication was right, or evaluate a new partnership - the purpose provided the reference point. This is what separates social purpose strategy from a branding exercise: it doesn't just describe the organisation, it actively guides how the organisation works.

The positioning strategy gave them a clear, differentiated place in the social investment landscape. Their engagement strategy meant they could connect with different audiences authentically rather than generically. The refined service offering made it easier for the right people to find them and understand what partnership looked like.

This mattered in a sector that was growing fast. The UK's social impact investment market has grown thirteen-fold since 2011, now exceeding £11 billion. In that expanding landscape, a clear social purpose strategy isn't a nice-to-have - it's what allows an organisation to attract the right partners, make better investment decisions, and create genuine impact rather than spreading resources too thinly.

Most importantly, the organisation could now articulate clearly and powerfully why it existed. That clarity of purpose flowed into everything: from how they assessed opportunities to how they communicated with the world.

Most of what's written about purpose and strategy takes a corporate perspective - large organisations adding social purpose to justify their existence beyond profit. The Nominet Trust project revealed something fundamentally different: for organisations that already exist for social good, the challenge isn't adding purpose. It's uncovering the purpose that's already there and making it drive everything.

This is a different kind of social purpose strategy. It doesn't bolt purpose onto an existing business model. It starts with belief and builds outward - through organisational purpose, into positioning strategy, engagement strategy and service offering. Purpose doesn't sit alongside the strategy. Purpose is the strategy.

The project also showed that authentic purpose can't be designed in isolation. A social purpose strategy has to be discovered collaboratively - drawn from the real beliefs and motivations of the people who make up the organisation. When purpose is genuinely shared rather than imposed, it becomes a natural guide for decisions rather than a poster on the wall.

For any purpose-driven organisation wrestling with how to express what they stand for, the lesson is clear. Social purpose strategy starts with uncovering what you genuinely believe, then building everything else from that foundation. When purpose drives positioning strategy, engagement strategy and services - rather than being an afterthought - it creates the kind of authentic direction that no amount of conventional branding can achieve. This is what strategy implementation looks like when purpose is the starting point rather than the end goal.

This work helped shape our understanding of how organisational purpose functions as a strategic foundation - an insight that became central to the Intentional Ecosystems approach, where unifying purpose is the first dimension of organisational health precisely because everything else flows from it.