Speaking a Common Language

A core challenge in measuring social impact has been a lack of consistency for collecting and aggregating data. Now the IRIS standards provide the framework so everyone can agree on the definitions of terms such as Water Use, Renewable Energy, and Wage Equity.

• Organizations will immediately benefit from the ability to track investments, projects, grants and capabilities
• Define standard sets of metrics that are easily applied to projects or investments
• Establish “health” (Red-Yellow-Green) performance indicators for every project
• Perform Capability Assessments on projects and investments

Pulse Background

Pulse was created between Acumen Fund and engineers from Google.com and developed on Salesforce.com with help from the Google.org, the Skoll Foundation, the WK Kellogg Foundation, the Lodestar Foundation and Salesforce.com Foundation. App-X was selected in 2009 to manage and create a technical ecosystem to support Pulse. B-Lab and the Rockefeller Foundation teamed to define data standards for impact investing. The work on IRIS was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, and with pro bono contributions from PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Deloitte.