The purpose of this Guiding Principle is to help organisations from all sectors in the impact economy to easily measure and report on impact, and to set a common standard for what is good impact reporting.
This Guiding Principle is based on the results of a collaboration between The Swedish National Advisory Board for Impact Investing, Effektfullt – a non for profit organisation promoting good impact measurement practices - and leading audit and advisory firm PwC in Sweden.
We believe that impact measurement should be relatively easy to understand and to carry out. Good impact measurement practices should not be reserved for only the very specialised or the very resourceful. If we do not have a good, easy and common method for measuring impact, we fear that only a very limited number of actors in the ecosystem will actually implement good practices in this area, leading to low accountability, impact washing and difficulties in basing decisions on impact data and knowledge.
The methodology for measuring impact presented in this Guiding Principle is based on the definition of impact in our Guiding Principle: Definition of Impact, which in turn is based on the Impact Management Projects five dimensions of impact and globally established consensus on how impactshould be measured.
Our Guiding Principles are always work in progress. We will continue to refine them as the knowledge and experience in the impact space grow. We welcome feedback from users of the Principles and we actively seek thoughts and suggestions from users.
This Guiding Principle was last updated on December 15th 2021, and represents, in our opinion, the best approach to measuring impact that we know of to date.
We hope you will find it useful in your impact strategies. Please do not hesitate to send feedback, thoughts and questions to our Secretary, Jenny Carenco: jenny@swedishnab.se.