How Can Organizations Report on Impact with Integrity?
Why It Matters
As impact reporting becomes vital to organizations, we face a big challenge: the social finance world lacks common standards. How can practitioners agree on the same metrics and method to create truly reflective data, while still remaining accountable to their core stakeholders? This story is crafted in partnership with the MaRS Centre for Impact Investing in the lead up to the 2019 Social Finance Forum.
As investors and businesses search for greater social value in their activities, an important question emerges: how do you actually measure social and environmental impact?
โIf you really want to guard against โgreenwashingโ [when corporations make exaggerated claims of positive impact], youโve got to measure and report,โ said Michael Unwin, Co-Founder of Act Analytics, a platform which assesses companiesโ Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors.
The principles of accounting provide clear standards for financial value, allowing organizations to be held accountable to those results. In social finance, however, the picture is much less clear. The ESG and impact investing movements have seen a proliferation of measurement companies, tools, and guidance principles. How
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