"The Outcomes Matrix provides a useful starting point for you to consider the social impact that you are trying to deliver and how you will measure it. This tool includes outcomes and measures for nine outcome areas and 15 beneficiary groups."
"The Middlebury Institute's Center for Social Impact Learning in partnership with SVT Group report offers a shortcut to practical information about how impact investors are tracking and reporting their social and environmental impact today. The report also includes advice from impact investors to those new to the field, and summarizes the history of impact investing, key terms and concepts in impact measurement, and trends, and provides a practical guide to the most relevant publications."
"This report reviews the state of measurement as of 2014 in two types of organizations that directly support small and growing businesses (SGBs) - impact investors and capacity development providers. Using a mixed-methods approach, ANDE collected data and interviewed over 30 organizations across these two categories, and analyzed key trends in measurement practice."
"The Impact Management Project is a global effort of over 700 organizations to share fundamentals for how to talk about, measure and manage impact. This involves a thorough understanding of the investor's perspective, and how asset managers view impact on people and planet. The report describes the "five dimensions of impact" and what fundamentals investors and businesses should agree on to achieve their impact goals."
"The GRI Standards help organizations’ understand their outward impacts: on the economy, environment, and society. This increases accountability and enhances transparency on their contribution to sustainable development. Organizations can either use the GRI Standards to prepare a sustainability report in accordance with the Standards. Or they can use selected Standards, or parts of their content, to report information for specific users or purposes, such as reporting their climate change impacts for their investors and consumers."
"The DCED Standard is a practical framework for private sector development programmes to monitor progress towards their objectives. It comprises seven elements, listed in the box to the right, which are the minimum required for a credible results measurement process. By adopting these elements, programme managers can understand what is working and why, and use monitoring information to improve the effectiveness of their work."
"These interactive story dashboards provide information on the lending activities to agricultural SMEs and producer organizations by the Council on Smallholder Agricultural Finance (CSAF). CSAF consists of 13 private lenders that come together on a pre-competitive basis to share learning and develop industry standards to promote the healthy growth of the financial market serving small- and medium-enterprises (SMEs), including associations of smallholder farmers, in the agriculture sector."
"This publication identifies synergies between the DCED Standard for Results Measurement (the Standard) and the Global Impact Investing Network's IRIS+ system, which builds on the IRIS metrics catalogue and the Navigating Impact Project...The DCED Standard for Results Measurement (Standard) is a framework that helps organisations and programmes manage for impact...The IRIS+ system helps investors measure the social, environmental and financial performance of an investment and IRIS+ combines impact investing's most widely used impact performance metrics with research, evidence, and practical implementation guidance into a single comprehensive system."
"This paper attempts to assess the impacts of a management training program on the business performance of small enterprises in a metalworking cluster in Nairobi, Kenya. Based on the observed differences in management between successful and less successful enterprises, we designed a management training program featuring the basics of KAIZEN, an inexpensive, commonsense approach to management emphasizing the reduction of wasted work and materials, for the less successful enterprises.
This paper finds that business owners operating smaller enterprises tended to be self-selected into training participation. The training effects combined with the self-selection effect, which we estimate with panel data, were statistically significant and particularly stronger on profits than on sales revenues, while other training programs that did not teach KAIZEN had positive effects on sales revenues, not profits. As a result, the participants caught up with and overtook the non-participants in terms of average sales revenues and average profits, respectively."
"This note explains how two tools - the DCED Standard for Results Measurement (the Standard) and the Impact Management Project's impact dimensions can be used to develop impact management systems. Each tool originated in different communities - the Standard in international development community, specifically related private sector development, and the Impact Management Project for investors and with input from a wide range of organisations. Both communities seek to learn and share experiences with others to continually improve impact. The DCED Standard for Results Measurement (Standard) is a comprehensive practical framework to manage for impact."