The concepts
behind the score.
Impact Vision automates a discipline that already exists. This page is the short version of that discipline — enough to read a generated report critically, challenge a number, and know which question to ask when a claim feels thin.
What impact investing actually means
Investing with the intention to generate positive, measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return. Three words carry the weight: intention (it was the plan, not a happy accident), measurable (someone can check), and alongside (the return is real, not a rounding error).
Traditional investing seeks financial return only. Philanthropy seeks social good only, and the capital does not come back. Impact investing insists on both — which means it inherits the evidential burden of both.
| Concept | What it means |
|---|---|
| IRIS+ | The “GAAP for impact” — ~787 standardised metrics maintained by GIIN |
| SDGs | 17 UN Goals with 169 Targets |
| 5 Dimensions | What · Who · How Much · Contribution · Risk |
| Impact DD | Diligence on whether the claimed impact will actually occur |
| ESG | Risk-management frameworks — SASB, GRI, TCFD, SFDR, ISSB, ESRS |
| NESTA evidence | Five levels, from narrative to rigorous RCT |
The five dimensions of impact.
The standard grammar for assessing impact quality. A claim that cannot answer all five is not yet an impact claim — it is a hope with a chart attached.
What
What outcome is occurring, and how important is it to the people experiencing it? Not the activity, not the output — the change in someone's life.
Who
Who experiences the outcome, and how underserved were they beforehand? The same outcome delivered to an already well-served group is worth less.
How Much
How many people, how much change each, and for how long? Scale, depth and duration together — the dimension decks most often skip.
Contribution
Would this have happened anyway? Additionality against a credible counterfactual, rather than taking full credit for a rising tide.
Risk
What could go wrong? Evidence risk, external risk, stakeholder participation risk, drop-off risk, unexpected-impact risk, efficiency risk, execution risk, alignment risk, endurance risk.
How strong is the evidence, really?
Impact Vision rates every diligence answer on this five-level scale, which is why two companies making the same claim can score very differently. Most early-stage companies sit at Level 1 or 2 — that is fine and expected. Presenting Level 1 as Level 4 is not.
| Level | Name | What you must be able to show |
|---|---|---|
| Level 1 | Narrative | You can describe a plausible story of why your intervention should work. No data yet. |
| Level 2 | Data on change | You have data showing change occurred among the people you served — but nothing to compare it against. |
| Level 3 | Comparison | You can show the change is more likely to have happened because of your intervention, using a comparison group or a control. |
| Level 4 | Independent replication | One or more independent evaluations confirm the effect, and it holds in more than one setting. |
| Level 5 | Scaled & validated | The effect holds at scale under rigorous methods — typically randomised controlled trials — with manuals and fidelity understood. |
The Sustainable Development Goals.
Adopted by all UN member states in 2015 as a shared agenda to 2030. As an investor framework they are best used at target level — a specific target has an indicator, and an indicator can be measured.
Terms worth getting right.
IRIS+
The GIIN's catalogue of roughly 787 standardised impact metrics with SDG mappings and 5-Dimension tags — often described as the GAAP for impact. Core Metric Sets bundle the metrics that matter for a given theme, so you are not choosing indicators from scratch.
SDGs
The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals and their 169 Targets. Alignment claims should name the target, not just the goal — “SDG 6” is a colour, “target 6.3 on water quality” is a commitment.
Additionality
Whether the outcome would have occurred without your capital or intervention. The hardest question in impact investing and the one most often answered by assertion.
Theory of Change
The causal chain from inputs and activities to outputs, outcomes and impact, with the assumptions between each link made explicit and testable.
SFDR Articles 6 / 8 / 9
The EU classification of funds by sustainability ambition: Article 6 (no sustainability claim), Article 8 (promotes ESG characteristics), Article 9 (sustainable investment as its objective). Article 9 carries the heaviest evidential burden.
PAI indicators
Principal Adverse Impacts — 14 mandatory and 9 optional indicators SFDR requires funds to report on, covering emissions, biodiversity, water, waste, social and governance harms.
Double materiality
The CSRD requirement to assess both how sustainability issues affect the company (financial materiality) and how the company affects the world (impact materiality). Most ESG reporting only ever did the first.
Scope 1 / 2 / 3
Direct emissions, purchased-energy emissions, and value-chain emissions. For an investor, Scope 3 is dominated by financed emissions, which is what PCAF exists to attribute.
PCAF
The Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials methodology for attributing a share of a portfolio company's emissions to the investor, with a data-quality score attached to each estimate.
SROI
Social Return on Investment: a monetised ratio of value created to capital invested, adjusted for deadweight, attribution, displacement and drop-off. Useful when built honestly, meaningless when the adjustments are skipped.
Greenwashing
Claims that overstate sustainability performance. Now explicitly regulated — the UK FCA anti-greenwashing rule and the EU Empowering Consumers Directive both require claims to be fair, clear and substantiated.
Impact washing
The impact-investing variant: labelling ordinary investments as impact without intention, measurement or additionality. Detectable, largely, by asking the five dimensions and watching what cannot be answered.
Four questions that
separate signal from story.
Whether the report came from Impact Vision or from a consultant's deck, these hold up.
Is the outcome named, or only the activity?
“Trained 4,000 farmers” is an output. “Yields rose 18% for 4,000 smallholders” is an outcome.
Who was underserved, and by what measure?
Depth of underservedness should be stated, not implied by geography.
What is the counterfactual?
If no credible answer exists, contribution is unproven — which is a finding, not a failure.
What evidence level supports each number?
A single number carrying Level 1 evidence should not appear in an LP report without that label.
Apply all of it to a real deck.
Impact Vision runs these frameworks against an actual document in minutes, and shows the source text behind every score.