What Are The 5 Dimensions Of Impact?

In this article, we will be talking about the 5 Dimensions of Impact as formulated by the Impact Management Project. Impact Management Project is a forum for building global consensus on how to measure and manage impacts. And these 5 dimensions have been built in consensus with over 2,000 organizations from all over the world.

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Any work that you do with your organization, any intervention, any CSR project creates some impact. Of course, the intention is always to create positive impacts, but in real life despite the best intentions sometimes we end up creating negative impacts. To clearly understand what kind of impacts you have created on people, on the planet, there are 5 key dimensions that you need to understand & evaluate your performance on.

The 5 dimensions of impact are really the building blocks of any intervention or a project that aims to create an impact on people & planet. And ideally, you should be putting your impact measurement framework over this.

You should be thinking about 5 dimensions of impact from the very beginning of your project. But in case you are already in between a project, you can still use this framework to make your impact report much stronger & valid.

Now, let’s deep dive into what are those 5 dimensions.

1. The first dimension is WHAT?

This dimension helps you understand two main things:

• Firstly, what outcome is your project or intervention creating?
• And secondly, how important is that outcome to the stakeholders?

For example, if you are running an awareness campaign to help infants living in rural areas get proper medical attention & vaccination. Then, your outcome that you need to measure might be % decrease in infant mortality rate.

This is a very clear case of creating positive & intended outcomes. But it is possible that you created negative outcomes or unintended outcomes.

As a part of this first dimension, you also need to measure & evaluate these outcomes. Another layer of this first dimension is if it met the needs of your stakeholders. For example, your donors, your team members, and even your beneficiaries. You need to evaluate how important that outcome is to your stakeholders. For example, you might have decreased the infant mortality rate in a village by 3%, but still hundreds of infants die in a year & maybe your stakeholders, in this case, the parents living in these villages feel that this 3% decrease is not enough.

The third layer is that if the outcomes you are creating are considered important by the stakeholders when compared with other outcomes.

This data should ideally be calculated by asking the question to the stakeholders or if it’s environment-related, then you might need to check scientific research.

The fourth & last layer of this dimension is if your outcome relates or contributes to international standards & goals like the sustainable development goals, and how much? It could be just one goal or more than one. But this aspect is really really important to understand the true effectiveness of your outcome. Our current example would relate to SD goal no. 3: Health & wellbeing.

2. The second dimension is WHO?

This second dimension covers who are the stakeholders that you created these outcomes for. The main objective of this dimension is to be able to identify stakeholders who need the most help & resources, and also who will experience the highest degree of change & impact.

In order to do that, IMP suggests identifying your stakeholders by also understanding how underserved they are in comparison to another group of stakeholders. There are 4 data categories that you can measure to understand this second dimension.

The first data category is what type of stakeholder are you affecting? Is it a certain section of the community? As in our example, it was the infants & their parents who are financially underprivileged and lack awareness about health-related issues. This category also encourages organizations to look at all the multiple stakeholders you might affect — intentionally or unintentionally.

For example, in this case, it is possible you also affect the medical professionals working with you on this project.

The second data category is where your stakeholders are located. Now it was possible that you could have gone to a community living in North Jakarta v/s a community living in a small village in Java. The community living in North Jakarta already has some other resources available thanks to a better medical system or some other NGOs working in the same area. Whereas this other village has not received any external help yet. So who would you rather try to affect & allocate your resources to?

The area could be as broad as a city or very targeted, but this dimension can help you in many ways. One of them is understanding the cultural nuances of that area and adapting your intervention accordingly or understanding the environmental conditions of that geographical area can also help you design better interventions.

The third data category under this dimension is baselining. This data helps you understand what was the outcome that your stakeholder groups were experiencing before your project or intervention started. This is the data which will help you understand how underserved or well-served your stakeholders are, it gives you a clear picture on which you can set up your goals & then measure & benchmark your performance.

In our hypothetical example, we can say that with baselining we found out that only 10% of new born children were receiving proper vaccination, so the intervention set the goal of taking this figure to at least 50% in one year. And then after a year, the intervention assessed its performance and found out that they could reach a figure of 45%.

It’s also very important that you have the same baselining indicator as the outcome indicator for your project.

The last data category under this dimension of who is — understanding the socio-graphic & behavioral data about your stakeholders.

For example, trying to understand what is the reason that the parents are not getting their kids proper vaccines. You might find out that while there is one group which doesn’t have enough awareness, there is a second group which is aware but does not have enough money to get the vaccines. This will enable you to design your interventions in a way that you can solve for their specific needs.

An important thing to keep in mind here is to evaluate what particular socio-graphic or behavioral data you are going to measure, which will help you the most.

These are your first 2 dimensions of impact — What & Who. And again, we really can’t stress enough on the importance of incorporating this framework while designing your interventions.

This is already a lot of information to take in & understand. So, we will take a break here and talk about the other 3 dimensions of impact in our next episode. Till then if you have any questions, feel free to write to us. We also have great podcasts talking about Impact reporting, which should help you more about where these 5 dimensions can fit in your project & reporting. So go ahead and listen to that podcast, if you have not already.

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