MKE at AVPN Singapore

On June 27th our Chief Economist Adam McCarty will present at the panel discussion ‘Building global consensus on impact measurement and management’. In this panel, leading experts from the field of Monitoring & Evaluation and impact investing will discuss the challenges and latest developments associated with creating and implementing accurate and comparable impact management practices.

While for private sector actors is easier to design a common framework for measuring financial performance, the variety of impact dimensions as well as the difficulty in gathering and interpreting data makes it challenging to define common practices in impact investing.

But that’s not an excuse to avoid measuring impact.

Hence, rather than engaging in discussions on what to best measure (as dimensions of impact are very different), practitioners should focus on how to best measure impact. Common practices need to be designed in a way so they can be used by everyone, and thus they need to be flexible and easy to understand. Companies and investors might find difficult to approach complex and costly impact measurement methodologies such as Randomized Control Trials (RCTs), despite they represent the ‘Gold Standard’ in impact measurement. At the same time, too simple techniques might fail to measure ‘additionality’, which is what the business or the program ‘adds’ to the environment where it operates, creating impact.

We have condensed our views on how different stakeholders measure and report impact in the table below. What is clear is that within the industry there is an increasing consensus on three fundamentals of good impact measurement and management:

• Both positive and negative impact need to be measured and reported (“happy stories” are not going to cut it)
• Understanding additionality is key
• Impact data needs to be understood in context (eg. “Jobs created” is not enough, you need context on the jobs created to understand if it’s impactful or not)

The Asian Venture Philanthropy Network (AVPN) is a unique funders’ network based in Singapore committed to building a vibrant and high impact philanthropy and social investment community across Asia. As an advocate, capacity builder, and platform that cuts across private, public and social sectors, AVPN embraces all types of engagement to improve the effectiveness of members across the Asia Pacific region.