Our vision is a world where all investors and enterprises collect useful information about their material effects on people and planet and therefore improve performance.

The act of measurement — the mere collection of impact data at all — should not be the real differentiator between impact investing and “other” investing. Instead, all investments would differentiate themselves based on the impact they have.

Five dimensions of impact:
Our impact is the combination of material effects that we have on people and planet. We can understand which effects are material by considering:

  1. WHAT outcome(s), positive or negative, the effect drives and whether it is important to the person (or planet) experiencing it
  2. WHO experiences the effect and how underserved they are in relation to the outcome(s)
  3. HOW MUCH of the effect occurs in terms of its depth, how many people it occurs for, how long it lasts and how quickly it occurs
  4. The CONTRIBUTION that the effect makes to what the market would do anyway
  5. The RISK that the effect will differ from our expectation

We can each try to ensure that the five dimensions of impact are visible in our decision-making frameworks and how we talk about our goals. From there, we can look at the data we’re collecting to see if we understand performance across all dimensions.

Read the source article at ImpactAlpha