To maximise the impact of our economic development programing and activities, it’s critical to design them well upfront with the audience as the central focus. What we know through our work is that in order for economics and economic development to be innovative and for initiatives to stick, they need to have a high level of design. A lack of skill in design tends to be where these initiatives fail to either launch correctly or their value realised because they have not fully solved the problem. Sparrowly Group's Federico Moreno provides a stepped approach to design thinking to help economic developers.

Discussions of whether or not one type of impact analysis - economic, social, or environmental - deserve precedence over the other are ill-founded and miss the fact that all three are necessary to inform good decision making and each other.

That said, economic analysis carries obvious advantages, being a robust way to weigh the impacts between different physical, financial, and subjective intangible effects for individual people, and then weight the balance of those effects between people. That dollars are only a convenient, but arbitrary, yardstick of relative preferences and therefore well-being is aside to the actual aims of economic analysis. Albeit one often poorly explained by economists, and therefore, commonly misunderstood by non-economists through no fault of their own.

Sparowly Group’s Senior Economist, Sam Miller provides a explainer to help demystify misperceptions.

Grant writing can be daunting but it doesn’t have to be. Sparrowly Group’s Naomi Farrelly shares her grant writing tips to help you put your best foot forward.

Sparrowly Group’s Managing Director, Giovanna Lever shares how she has continued to apply the 5% to the business and in life, and how it has helped maintain focus as the world adapts to a new normal.

Now that the New Year hype is over and the pressure for new starts is off, let’s get real about creating goals and bring it back to basics. Giovanna Lever has mentored hundreds of individuals in her career from school leavers to senior managers and small business owners.