The Five Dimensions of Impact. Linking measurement, management, and the sustainability process.

Since 2016, the Impact Management Project (IMP) have been collaborating with over two thousand organisations in the industry to build a global consensus on how we talk about, measure and manage our ESG risks and positive impacts. The IMP found that understanding impact requires collecting data across these five dimensions:

 

  • What tells us what outcome the enterprise is contributing to, whether it is positive or negative, and how important the outcome is to stakeholders.
  • Who tells us which stakeholders are experiencing the outcome and how underserved they are in relation to the outcome. 
  • How Much tells us how many stakeholders experienced the outcome, what degree of change they experienced, and how long they experienced the outcome for.
  • Contribution tells us whether an enterprise’s and/or investor’s efforts resulted in outcomes that were likely better than what would have occurred otherwise.
  • Risk tells us the likelihood that impact will be different than expected.

 

At Insight Into Impact we build stakeholder engagement systems to measure impact in accordance with these five dimensions. Your stakeholders may include funders, investors, employers, distributors, customers, and beneficiaries. We analyse your engagement data using our proprietary model. This process enables you to make data-driven decisions that will increase your impact and predict probability of success of your projects and programs. To learn more, book a free consultation with Dr. Marcus Curcija today. 

In a recent interview with Rosemary Addis we discussed the 5 dimensions of impact and how businesses can incorporate this into their management.

Listen to the full interview here.

“If we want to be improving our performance, just like we do on the financial side of business or in other decisions that we make, we also want to be taking the measures to be informing what we do next. We want to be able to have the measures, telling us, are we making progress in the right direction, if not what do we need to prospect for; if we are making progress in the right direction; are there things we want to be doing more.” – Rosemary Addis AM