She didn't wait for policy. She just started buying differently.
Nicole Donnison at Icon, turning contracts into community impact.
When a construction company signs a subcontract, most people see a commercial transaction. Nicole Donnison sees an opportunity, to use the sheer purchasing power of the built environment to change lives at scale.
This is the lens through which Nicole, Regional Social Procurement Manager at Icon, has built her career. It's also why Social Traders named her the 2025 Business for Good Game Changer of the Year.
If your business is still sitting on the fence about social procurement, Nicole's story is your case study. If you're wondering whether one person can move an industry, here's your answer.
What is social procurement and why should you care?
Social procurement means using your organisation's buying power to generate social value alongside commercial value. Rather than automatically awarding contracts to the cheapest or most established supplier, socially conscious buyers deliberately seek out social enterprises – businesses that trade commercially and reinvest their profits to address social, cultural, or environmental challenges.
The business case is straightforward. Social enterprises deliver quality goods and services, often at competitive prices, while creating employment pathways for people facing real barriers to work – homelessness, disability, long-term unemployment, or family violence. Every contract your business signs becomes a social dividend.
And yet most sectors leave this value on the table. The barrier is rarely goodwill. It's awareness, process, and internal buy-in. Nicole Donnison has spent her career dismantling all three.
Moving from intention to action
Nicole's most tangible contribution to the sector started with a simple idea: bring people together, face to face, and let relationships do the rest.
Since 2022, she has personally facilitated ten Meet the Supplier events across Western Australia, the ACT, Queensland, and Victoria. These events place subcontractors, Icon staff, and Social Traders certified social enterprises in the same room - not for panel discussions, but for purposeful, practical conversations where buyers meet suppliers and commercial relationships begin.
Nicole also harnesses strong partnerships to create long-term value. One example was with YMCA ReBuild that spanned a decade. Through steady advocacy and deliberate scope expansion, Nicole helped grow the certified social enterprise from landscape maintenance packages worth $60,000 to carpentry contracts valued at $1 million by 2025. That's what sustained commitment to a social enterprise partner actually looks like.
Making social enterprises impossible to overlook
Social enterprises face a familiar catch-22: they need contracts to grow, but they need visibility to win contracts. Nicole made breaking this cycle her mission.
She elevated organisations like Assembled Threads and Fruit2Work – creating introductions and championing their capabilities in commercial conversations where social enterprises are often an afterthought.
She supported the Men's Project's certification, expanding their reach into construction to address harmful attitudes around masculinity in one of Australia's most male-dominated industries. Nicole is now working with Australia Spatial Analytics on curated events with architects and design consultants, opening new markets for social enterprises to grow their client base and deepen their impact.
Assembled Threads
Building the business case from the inside out
Nicole's most underrated skill is her ability to win internal buy-in inside large, slow-moving organisations. Government agencies, industry bodies, and major contractors now regularly invite her to share how she built the business case for social procurement within Icon.
Her approach combines genuine commercial understanding with deep empathy for people experiencing hardship. She doesn't ask procurement managers to choose between commercial outcomes and social ones. She shows them with data, stories, and results – they don't have to choose.
Her platforms for this message have grown steadily: ABC News, the World Sustainable Contracting Panel, the Master Builders Victoria Podcast, a keynote at the Homes Victoria Social Procurement Industry Breakfast, and a 2025 keynote for NAWIC.
She collaborates with Professor Martin Loosemore at UTS on best practice case studies and contributes to research at the University of Melbourne and RMIT. A scholarship from Social Impact Hub sharpened her practice in social impact measurement and storytelling – tools she immediately turned back on the industry.
Your procurement is your power
Nicole didn't wait for regulation. She didn't wait for a policy mandate or a government tender requirement. She built the case one conversation at a time and let the results make the argument for her.
The question her career puts to every business leader is a simple one: What are you already buying, and which certified social enterprise could you be buying it from?
Social enterprises operate across almost every category of business spending – catering, cleaning, consulting, clothing, marketing, logistics, and more. The opportunity is there. The social enterprises are ready.
Social Traders supports Nicole and organisations like Icon to access a national network of certified social enterprises, and measure and report on tangible social impact outcomes with confidence – with our unique data and reporting capabilities.
What the sector needs now is more people with Nicole's conviction: that business the focus on driving social performance through their supply chain, is one of the most powerful forces for good we have.
Be the social performance advocate of your industry and make business for good, business as usual.
Convene delegates
Convene 2026: Where leaders move beyond intention and into action
Social performance is the impact a business has on people. Essentially, how a business delivers on the “S” in ESG.
Understanding this impact on people, customers, suppliers and communities - and translating it into real business value is one of the most important and rapidly evolving challenges facing organisations today.
Back for its 12th year, Convene is the national sector conference held at a defining moment in social value for Australian business. Be in the room with those leading the way and showing what's possible.
Join the industry body for social performance
We'll help you deliver and report on social value confidently, so you can lead in your industry.
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