Measuring and Improving Social Impacts: A Guide for Nonprofits, Companies, and Impact Investors

The world is beset with enormous problems. And as a nonprofit, NGO, foundation, impact investor, or socially responsible company, your organization is on a mission to solve them.

But what exactly should you do? And how will you know whether it’s working? Too many people assume that good intentions will result in meaningful actions and leave it at that. But thanks to Marc Epstein and Kristi Yuthas, social impact can now be evaluated with the same kind of precision achieved for any other organizational function.

Based on years of research and analysis of field studies from around the globe, Epstein and Yuthas offer a five-step process that will help you gain clarity about the impacts that matter most to you and will provide you with methods to measure and improve them. They outline a systematic approach to deciding what resources you should invest, what problem you should address, and which activities and organizations you should support. Once you’ve made those decisions, you can use their tools, frameworks, and metrics to define exactly what success looks like, even for goals like reducing global warming or poverty that are extremely difficult to measure. Then they show you how to use that data to further develop and increase your social impact.

Epstein and Yuthas personally interviewed leaders at over sixty different organizations for this book and include examples from nearly a hundred more. This is unquestionably the most complete, practical, and thoroughly researched guide to taking a rigorous, data-driven approach to expanding the good you do in the world.

Marc J. Epstein is Distinguished Research Professor of Management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. He has been a professor at Stanford Business School, Harvard Business School, and INSEAD. He is the author of twenty books and numerous academic and managerial articles.
Kristi Yuthas is Swigert Endowed Chair at Portland State University’s School of Business Administration and has worked with companies and nonprofits around the world. She has authored over a hundred presentations and publications in sustainability, ethics, and the use of business tools to address social issues.