Climate Impact Partners
Driving new digital differentiation and self-service efficiency to increase valuation
A digital platform to maintain market leadership and drive client value
Design serves as a critical, two-fold growth lever for PE-backed businesses focused on creating new value and communicating a compelling future state. Our work with Climate Impact Partners was focused on the first lever: how strategically designing a new proposition created an indispensable new value stream that expanded commercial potential and ROI.
Climate Impact Partners is a trusted leader in the voluntary carbon market, formed from the merger of ClimateCare and Natural Capital Partners. They provide solutions for climate action to companies and organisations worldwide to help meet their climate targets, including net-zero and carbon neutrality goals. Following the integration, the company faced a dual challenge: defending its market position against the fast pace of new, digital-first competitors, and delivering increased value to its high-volume enterprise clients.
They needed a strategy to differentiate themselves, improve client retention, and drive new client acquisition, all while improving the efficiency of its service and maintaining margin. The key objective was to move to an actionable, evidence-based plan for a digital product that would retain and grow existing clients and attract new project partners. This fed back into their wider corporate objective of new value creation post PE backing.
A human-insights-led digital transformation
Made by Many took a customer-first approach to create, design, and develop a zero-to-one digital carbon offsetting platform for their most valuable customers: the Climate Impact Partners Dashboard.
1. Rapid vision & discovery
The project began with an intensive, eight-week discovery phase that delivered a prioritised plan and investment case for taking the product to the next phase. A key objective for this phase was to deliver a financial investment case to support decision-making and demonstrate the product's return on value to the business. This immediate focus secured buy-in from the wider team and the confidence to proceed to the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
Insight-driven strategy: We conducted primary design research using a human-insights-led approach to understand the core issues, frustrations, and needs of the business and its high-value global clients. This work identified key areas where Climate Impact Partners could strengthen client relationships: improving transparency in our collaboration process, providing clearer industry guidance, and better equipping clients to showcase their climate impact achievements. By taking the time to uncover these pain points, we were able to turn improvement ideas into testable concepts and bring the customer’s voice into the heart of decision-making at the highest level.
Actionable roadmap: This phase delivered a prioritised, evidence-based plan for an MVP, including a framework for validating options against value, cost of ownership, and ROI objectives. This included a feasibility and cost analysis for building the platform versus buying an existing solution.
2. Design and build: Delivering a working platform in 100 Days
Leveraging the vision and insights, the focus shifted to iteratively designing and building the MVP.
Agile execution: We worked closely with Climate Impact Partner’s Tech Director to define a flexible and scalable architecture that optimised for customer experience and future hiring needs. Instead of a custom build versus an off-the-shelf purchase, we chose a hybrid approach. We built a custom aggregator application on Microsoft Azure, balancing development costs with long-term flexibility. This modular solution leverages Azure's SSO for secure access management, and uses industry-standard open-source tools for maintainability. This allowed Climate Impact Partners to progressively integrate additional data sources as their internal strategy matured, delivering immediate value while positioning the platform for scalable growth.
Speed to market: The project was engineered for velocity, delivering a working MVP of the new experience to clients within 100 days. The platform was built specifically for global multinational companies, including key strategic clients such as Microsoft, Deloitte, American Express, and Sky.
Achieving ROI through transparency and self-service: Following the successful launch of the MVP, the focus shifted to strategic scaling and validation. The work done to scale the platform to Climate Impact Partners’s highest-value accounts immediately translated into significant business results.
Key outcomes the business
Increased transparency & trust: The platform’s ‘Project detail’ and ‘Assets feature’ delivers essential information, addressing the critical industry need for due diligence and integrity.
Operational efficiency & time savings: Clients can easily access key carbon and EAC information for tracking and reporting through the ‘Purchase History’ feature, enabling self-service and eliminating manual processes.
Enhanced communications: The ‘Project Home’ feature allows clients to view, search, and filter projects from a global perspective, providing a visual, overall view useful for their internal and external communications.
Strategic relationship building: The portal’s intuitive design dramatically simplifies a complex subject, improving the relationship between clients and Climate Impact Partners and enabling easy access to data. “Having tried to deliver this information over many years to clients, I have a sense for how complicated it is but what Made by Many have created is beautifully simple.” Head of Sales, Climate Impact Partners
Made by Many have shown their expertise from start to finish. They have helped us take a complicated set of requirements and client needs, and turned it into something so beautiful with some really insightful feedback. The whole process has been fantastic, we’re thrilled.
CMO, Climate Impact Partners
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