We work to understand impact from the moment we begin due diligence on a company throughout the lifetime of the investment. Working closely with our companies, we generate, analyze and use data that enables them to understand and improve their social performance. Our aim is to unlock their full potential and achieve the greatest social change for the customers they serve.
The companies we invest in are delivering critical products and services that enable poor customers to transform their lives. We rigorously track the ability of our investees to reach these customers and provide hands-on advice on how to best serve them while building high-perfoming businesses.
To make a dent in global poverty, our reach has to be wide. That means investing in enterprises whose game-changing innovations have the potential to scale to millions of low-income customers.
To achieve outsized impact, we need to gather both quantitative and qualitative data to understand the effect a company is having on its customers’ quality of life over time.
Learn more about how we analyze impact in our portfolio and how you can apply the same building blocks to any socially-focused company or organization with our free online course, Making Sense of Social Impact: Acumen’s Building Blocks for Impact Analysis.
As a pioneer of impact investing, we played a key role in shaping the community’s approach to measurement. We co-developed the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS) and helped to found both the Aspen Network for Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) and the Global Impact Investment Network (GIIN).
These breakthroughs in measurement have helped answer the question of “what” we should measure, but they have had very little to say about “how” to measure. This is the problem we are trying to solve. Our new approach, called Lean Data, was created to address the unique and diverse needs of social enterprises, and it’s redefining what it means to align impact priorities with business priorities.
