Which social impact measurement system is the best?

Written by Distinguished Professor Martin Loosemore at University of Technology Sydney. Published to the UTS Social Procurement Community of Practice for the Construction Industry on 2 June 2026 and reproduced here with permission.

We regularly receive emails asking which proprietary social impact measurement system is the best.

In simple terms, we suggest people ask themselves four key questions:

QUESTION ONE:  Are they confident that the tool they are considering using will allow them to unequivocally show and defend that their claimed social impact meets the following basic internationally accepted rules of social impact measurement:

In simple terms, these include the principles of:

1.      Additionality – Are you only measuring and reporting impacts that go beyond core contract and business-as-usual contract requirements.

2.      Materiality – Does your impact means something to your business and its stakeholders and to the communities you are claiming to have helped.

3.      Verifiability – Is your claim based on a rigorously researched theory of change and methodology. The data on which it is based must be transparent, valid (based on validated instruments and measure what it claims to measure) and reliable (repeatable and representative of the population you are representing).

4.      Accuracy – Have you considered potential negative impacts and counterfactuals like deadweight (what would have happened anyway), attribution (what else could have contributed to the change), displacement (other benefits you may have pushed aside), substitution (other benefits you replaced), drop off (reduction of impacts over time) and cultural differences (in perceptions of social value).

QUESTION 2:  Can they confidently say YES to the following simple questions about the methodology underpinning the tool they are considering using:

1.      Can you defend your claims with 100% confidence if you have an expert in the audience asking what validated instruments you used to measure social impacts like improvements in people’s mental health, or improvements in community resilience etc.?

2.      Did you consult the communities which you purport to represent?

3.      Have you used internationally validated data and instruments to measure social impacts and value, based on peer reviewed research by experts in the field?

4.      Are your claims based on reliable and valid data based on methodologically robust data which was meant to be used for the purposes it is being used for? How is the data collected? What data is collected? Where does it come from? Who is it collected by? Is the data meant to be used for this purpose? How is it analyzed to produce the social impact results?  Etc.

QUESTION 3: Why do they need a proprietary tool to ‘measure’ social impact at all? Measurement implies quantification and often monetization which raises many ethical and methodological questions:

1)      Measurement can create tunnel vision that can reduce innovation by forcing people into a compliance mindset which focusses only on the outcomes and outputs that can be measured (not everything that matters can be measured and not everything that can be measured matters).

2)      Ask whether a proprietary systems been designed by people who have actually had experience of the complexities and personal commitments which are required to implement social procurement in practice. If not, how can a tool possibly account for the significant personal and organizational inputs which are required to achieve a reported output.

3)      It is worth noting that many large organizations (public and private) are moving away from monetizing and qualifying social value in reductionist ways. They are looking for more legitimate, rigorous, authentic and defendable ways of assessing and communicating social value which mean something to the communities which they represent.