Impact Scorecard

Impact Scorecard is a strategic tool that helps organizations to clearly and easily communicate the social impact outputs and outcomes that furthers their understanding of alignment of investor’s or funder’s impact thesis with that of investees and/or grantees.

The Impact Score card serves the following purposes:

1. Communicates the social impact of Investments or Projects
2. Allow organizations to refine their Impact Strategy to meet any Social Impact goals they may have set.
3. Simply the alignment of SDG indicators with the generated Social Impact outcomes.
4. Allows comparison of Impact between similar Investments or Projects in a portfolio or comparison with industry standards or peers.
5. Clearly Communicate the risks and assumptions recorded in the Impact Strategy.
6. Allows to predict or forecast Social Impact based on the Impact Strategy put in place by an organization.
7. Managed external services model

Impact Cloud Impact Scorecard is more than just reporting the quantitative outcome indicators. It was designed with a purpose of reporting the results to funders in the most easy to understand manner. The scorecard provides an intelligent combination of qualitative and quantitative data that intends to provide deep insights without the need for manual intervention.

 Imagine collecting qualitative data from your end beneficiaries and not being able to use it to measure the impact you are creating. Leaving out qualitative data from impact measurement creates a big gap. Impact Cloud lets you smartly combine qualitative and quantitative data.

Impact Scorecard provides the below out-of-the-box

1. Alignment of Indicators with SDG goals and targets.
2. Quick view of targets, forecast and actual values (including the difference between targets and actuals) for the output and outcome indicators based on the funders preference.
3. Compare partners results within your portfolio based on common metrics and indicators.
4. Compare your impact results with investments and industry peers through external data integration.
5. Combine qualitative data, such as sentiment analysis, from your end beneficiaries, helping you to truly understand your impact beyond just the numbers.

Funder can use Impact Due Diligence or Foundations can use organization health capacity before they decide to fund prospective grantees or investees.

As they work with various investments or grantees, they can communicate their

1. ESG Scores

2. Improvements in Results

3. Comparatives 

Collaborate with partners to improve results

Funders can easily engage with their partners when results are not meeting targets.  

• Qualitative and quantitative understanding of results 
• Discuss other partners for the program
• Refine impact strategy to improve results
• Learn and communicate story behind impact
• Use machine learning to get more insights out of internal and external impact data

Communicates and aligns goals with funders portfolio

If you are working with retail investors or individual donors to fund specific investment or grantee, you can quickly prepare personalized results for their investment or grantees.  Build a strong trust relationship with individual funder and improve ongoing relationship.

• Engage your retail investors or donors by sharing the impact report of their preferred investment.
• Raise impact capital by sharing impact scorecard on your website to align with impact goals of investors and impact organization

Build grants report and yearly reporting requirements

Flexible, Streamlined, and Fast

A typical program may have more than three programs, each of them may depend on larger funders.   Define standardized organization metrics, core program metrics and unique funder specific metrics for reporting.  Align these results from data collected, and you are done! 

Benefits:

• Organizational Metrics
• Core Metrics
• Program Specific Reporting
• Build reports in the short time

Impact Practitioner Led Impact Management Services

Certain organization due to organizational or legal goals would like to work with impact practitioners or consultants to manage impact reports.  They can get goals, targets and indicator defined by the service provider and collect results on timely basis.  Impact Scorecard is a perfect impact communication tool to communicate impact.

Benefits:

• Streamlined model
• Share impact scorecard on a pre-defined basis based on results collection frequency

Key Driver

Performance Monitoring of Outcome

While there is a clear realization that each grantees are unique, many grant makers create their own internal impact scorecard.

Few foundation requirements:

• A corporate foundation  often like outcomes-based giving strategy that could inform grantmaking
• A large private foundation often would like a grantee portfolio analysis and “roll up” the impact across all of its grantees so that it could produce a look-back analysis for historical impact.  They often would like to ensure all the past social impact evidence documentation and knowledge in single location so that they can see results consistently and reporting to its board.
• Manage baseline, target and actual impact data by grantees

Key Driver

Accountability and regulatory governance

Public agencies already have a well-known history of creating impact scorecard.  Of then used to report results of county, states or agency wide reporting

Examples are:

• Vermont: Access to health services
• Vermont: Early Childhood Screening
• Vermont: Family Planning Service

Key Driver

Build a trust with funder & reporting results

If charity or nonprofits wants to prove the effectiveness of its model to funders to secure grants and standardize the impact measures it reported to different funders.

Remember:

• Provide consistent impact report
• Integrate appropriate impact story
• Include appropriate impact context of your program

Key Driver

Monitor Country or State Level Progress of SDG Goals

As businesses, public agencies, international development agencies and impact investors align around sustainable development goals (SDG), it is important to simplify SDG impact indicators aggregation. Many countries have already started to create their on SDG Tracker.

Examples of SDG Trackers:

• Country level overall SDG tracker
• SDG Goal specific tracker
• SDG Tracker for Public-Private Initiatives

Impact Rating is Not Impact Scorecard

Many examples of impact ratings

There are many impact rating organization that define standardized impact through governance, social and environment metrics.  While these rating based approach allows 

Leading Impact Rating Systems

• MIX Market - Financial Inclusion Data, Analytics and Insight

• Impact Investment - GIIRS
• CDFI - AERIS.
• Social Performance Task Force

How Impact Scorecard Is Different

Impact Scorecard does not paint every business or nonprofit with the same broad brush.  The challenge with impact rating system is that it often has  similar metrics but fails to see that social impact is context sensitive. Every entrepreneur, business or nonprofit should be allowed to define context and social impact outcome.  Impact Scorecard allows to uniquely define impact of program, product and services.