Hello! Jessica and Elsa here! We have had the absolute pleasure of working with Global Mothers over the past few weeks to do some social impact research and to come up with fun ways to communicate their impact. Global Mothers is a social enterprise working with women in impoverished nations to provide them with the training and means to sell their products here in North America. This leads to a lifetime of skills and a sustainable income for the women to be able to take care of their families, while giving western consumers a chance to pick up beautifully handcrafted jewelry and accessories.

This is the first in our three-part series, which we’ll release over the week. We hope to give our readers a glimpse into the work we love. (-: Today, we’re talking about social impact and Acumen.

One of the main goals of this project was to research ways in which social impact is measured.

For those unfamiliar with social impact…

Social Impact is the resulting effects of an organization’s actions.

It’s important that a social organization is familiar with their impact so they know that their work is meaningful and effective. For Global Mothers, they wanted to measure how deep of an impact their work was having on the women they were partnering with. Having this kind of information not only allows them to adjust their operations if needed, but also acts as a good reminder that they are indeed serving a community in need.

To do this research, we took an online course Making Sense of Social Impact: Acumen’s Building Blocks for Impact Analysis. The course is held by Acumen, a non-profit investor group that supports companies, leaders, and ideas that are changing the way the world tackles poverty.

Structured in modules, the four-week course focused on these core ideas:

Breadth of Impact

Breadth of impact is the number of lives reached and jobs created. Like scale, it looks into how many people’s lives have been impacted, in any way, by the organization. This is best measured through the company’s sales figures because it relates to how many people are using the product.

Depth of Impact

Depth of impact is defined as the improvement in a household’s well-being and evaluates the change in someone’s life, both in a monetary and non-monetary sense. Examples of this include a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, an increase in test score percentages due to more study time, or a lower mortality rate in newborn babies.

A theory of change model is used to look at the changes result from an organization’s actions. The model outlines desired impacts and the steps taken to achieve them. It analyses the offerings of the organization and how the outcomes affect its audience.

Poverty Focus

Poverty focus is the understanding of who the organization’s customers are and how effectively they are reaching their target market.

It can be difficult to get reliable information on the poverty levels in some countries. Acumen recommends using the Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI), which estimates and tracks poverty rates by asking 10 country-specific questions. You can view these questions by country here.

The PPI will help determine the percentage of customers that are below the poverty line and track the progress of their customers over time in moving out of poverty.

Data Plan

A data plan is the strategy for obtaining and tracking the metrics that will help an organization understand its social performance. Investors often useIRIS metrics, a catalog containing metrics that measure the social, environmental, and financial performances of their investments.

Putting together the data plan begins with defining the end goals and an understanding as to why data is being collected. A good data plan needs a mixture of breadth and depth metrics, and also includes deadlines for these metrics, assigns a party to conduct the measurement, and accounts for the resources and time necessary to do so.

The result of a good data plan will answer the question we’re after: how much impact is a product or service creating for its audience?

Each component of this Acumen course will help a social organization build a foundation to tell their story of the change they are bringing to the world. Using the data plan strategy, they can begin to paint a picture of how many people are affected, how deeply their lives are touched, and who these people are. In the next part of this series, we’ll tell you why that’s important!

Ciao for now!