Quantifying the financial value of a medicine donation program.
A pharmaceutical VP running medicine donation programs in Africa had the frustration that shows up everywhere: the traditional impact metrics captured the easy part, and missed most of what the program actually did.
Business value the program was already creating that had never been counted.
Valutus framework and original research · second-order and catalytic effects · business value only · $100M+ in wider impact stated separately
The metrics stopped where the effects started.
The company was measuring what donation programs conventionally measure. Doses delivered. Patients treated. Real numbers, and a fraction of the story.
What they could not measure was everything that happened next. The effects did not stop at the patient. They ran into livelihoods, into families, into local economies, and into government budgets.
The VP had concluded it was impossible to quantify. It was not. It took under three months.
Second-order effects are dismissed as unmeasurable because they are indirect, not because they are small. Indirect and small are different words. Most of the value in this program was indirect and very large.
Follow the effect. All the way down.
The medicine improved health. That much was already counted. What followed was not, so the work traced each consequence to the point where it became a financial figure for the business or for the world.
Most of it had never been on a page.
For the first time, the company could see the whole program rather than the part that was easy to count.
The analysis identified more than $10M in uncaptured business value, and well over $100M of impact on individuals, the community, and the local economy that had never been quantified at all.
It also produced something more useful than a total: strategies for capturing tens of millions more. A figure tells you the value exists. A route tells you how to bank it.
The three questions that drove the analysis were simple to ask and had never been asked here. What second-order impacts were current assessments missing? What catalytic effects were there? And what was the financial value created, for the company and for the world?
A tremendous amount of the true impact, including the effect on livelihoods, migration patterns, income, and government services, was not immediately visible. But it could be surfaced, quantified, and valued.
On the engagement
Indirect is not the same as small.
The program had been running for years and creating value the entire time. None of that value was new. What was new was a number attached to it, and a set of routes for turning more of it into something the business could hold.
From submerged value to banked value.
Let us talk about the value you create, and how you can demonstrate it. Credibly and concretely.
- $10M is business value to the company. The $100M+ figure is impact on individuals, communities, and the local economy, and is reported separately because it is a different thing being measured.
- Second-order and catalytic effects were quantified using the scientific, social, and economic literature on the target disease, combined with original research.