Impact Target Setter and Impact Quantifier

Asset allocators seeking positive social and environmental outcomes have long lacked accessible impact analytic tools to support impact-driven decision-making. This gap has made it difficult to compare investments across sectors, especially as investors increasingly make choices that span impact themes, sectors and business models.

The GIIN Impact Lab has launched two new software tools to help investors maximize the impact of their capital: the Impact Target Setter and the Impact Quantifier. These tools are designed to help asset allocators make more informed, comparable and context-driven decisions when selecting funds, setting impact targets and evaluating outcomes across diverse investments. Widespread adoption of these tools presents an opportunity to enhance both the efficiency of capital allocation and the effectiveness of impact and financial performance.

Learn more about the Impact Quantifier in the report to the right or view the tools' Gitbook to understand the methodology, data, use cases and considerations that shape the tools' outputs.

Impact Target Setter and Impact Quantifier

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Explore the Impact Target Setter

The Impact Target Setter is designed to help asset allocators set clear and informed impact targets for fund investments. It supports more strategic capital deployment by incorporating variables such as geography, amount of capital deployed and impact theme — aligned with recognized frameworks like the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the GIIN’s IRIS+ system. The tool offers a structured starting point to guide discussions between asset allocators and fund managers, helping users define appropriate impact expectations based on need, scale and investment context. Rather than providing rigid or prescriptive targets, the tool offers approximate targets grounded in transparent data and assumptions, enabling better alignment across stakeholders.

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Explore the Impact Quantifier

Investors focused on environmental impact themes, such as climate change mitigation, primarily rely on greenhouse gas emissions as a consistent, measurable indicator to assess and compare climate impact. Social impact themes, which can range from housing and healthcare to education and financial inclusion, need a similarly valid and reliable measure to compare impact. Sector-specific impact metrics, such as number of patients accessing healthcare services or number of quality hospitals built, are critical when interpreting impact performance within impact themes. However, more broadly, asset allocators can look to quality of life to make comparisons across the portfolio in different sectors. Comparison across social impact themes based on quality of life has the potential to radically shift how asset allocators and managers channel capital.

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