From crickets to a stadium: seven years with Impact Hub Amsterdam

In 2019 Jeroen sat down with a startup that farmed crickets as a source of protein. A few weeks later he talked to a social enterprise that makes soup with and for older people. They were in the same cohort of the Food Chain Accelerator, and they had the same question. How do you show what your work changes, when you have only just started?

That question kept coming back. Since 2018 Jeroen has been resident impact expert at Impact Hub Amsterdam. He runs office hours, workshops and trainings, and coaches founders one to one. Since its first edition we have worked with every participant of the Food Chain Accelerator. That is more than seventy ventures so far.

During one session an entrepreneur in the Food Chain Accelerator said something that stayed with Jeroen.

That is where our work starts too. Not with a model, but with how entrepreneurs talk about their own work.

With ABN AMRO, Impact Hub and The Next Web, a very different programme started in 2020: Impact Nation. Not startups this time, but established companies. A family business making wall brackets, a printing company, a property company and the Johan Cruijff ArenA. Jeroen gave trainings there and a lot of one-to-one advice. What stood out was how similar the questions were. A company that is a hundred years old wants to know just as much what it changes, and for whom.

Since 2025 we have also worked on the Regeneration Program of Impact Hub. It goes one step further. Its entrepreneurs don’t only want to do less harm, but want to restore nature and communities. The programme runs for five months, with guidance, small-group working sessions and personal coaching. Narrate gives the impact management trainings there, just as in the Food Chain Accelerator.

What we saw over all those years is that the mission is often clear, but the figures lag behind. We saw it in local and global programmes. And in SMEs just as much as in corporates. Impact data and business data sit in separate spreadsheets. A pitch sometimes promises more than the venture can show. That is not bad will. People are busy, and measuring comes after the real work.

So we always start with one sentence about what changes, and for whom. Then we make a first theory of change on one A3 sheet, with the weakest assumption at the top. Only then do we choose the most important indicators, and for which rights-holders and stakeholders they count. We take them from data that already exists. For startups going to an investor, we link that to the five dimensions of impact and IRIS+. That way the story holds up better in due diligence. For established companies it is more often about choices inside the company itself.

It also gave something to the hub itself. Impact Hub wants to know what a programme achieves, across a whole cohort. For that we made a typology of the ventures, and a report at programme level from what participants already supplied.

Would you like us to take a look? That usually starts with one question you send us, for example just before a pitch.