What is Impact Score?
In the pursuit of creating an effective and comprehensive impact measurement tool, Socious has conducted an extensive review of existing impact measurement systems. This literature review outlines the key systems studied and their influence on the development of Socious's proprietary "Impact Score" system.
Impact Measurement Systems Reviewed
Impact-Weighted Accounts (IWA): Developed by Harvard Business School, IWA provided insights into quantifying and monetizing social and environmental impacts. The monetization aspect of IWA influenced the Impact Score's approach to translating diverse impacts into a unified metric.
GIIN's IRIS: IRIS's catalog of performance metrics offered a structured approach to measuring social, environmental, and financial success. This helped shape the Impact Score’s emphasis on versatile and standardized indicators.
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): The United Nations' SDGs guided the alignment of Impact Score objectives with broader global goals, ensuring that our system contributes to universally recognized targets.
Global Reporting Initiative (GRI): GRI's comprehensive sustainability standards influenced the Impact Score’s approach to encompassing a wide range of economic, environmental, and social factors.
B Impact Assessment: The holistic evaluation of social and environmental performance in this assessment guided the development of a multifaceted evaluation framework for the Impact Score.
Social Return on Investment (SROI): SROI’s methodology of assigning monetary values to social impact informed the Impact Score’s approach to quantifying intangible benefits.
Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability: This framework highlighted the importance of integrating sustainability into core business operations, which is reflected in the Impact Score's design.
Logic Model (Theory of Change): The logical mapping approach of this model influenced the Impact Score’s structure in tracing the journey from activities to long-term impacts.
Triple Bottom Line (3BL): The 3BL principle of evaluating social, environmental, and financial impacts equally was central to the balanced approach adopted in the Impact Score.
CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project): CDP's focus on environmental transparency reinforced the importance of clear, accountable reporting in the Impact Score system.
Impact Genome Registry: This registry offers a standardized approach to measuring and quantifying social impact.
Drawing from a broad spectrum of impact measurement systems, the Impact Score has been meticulously crafted as a holistic, versatile, and innovative tool for impact evaluation. Integrating best practices from established frameworks and incorporating innovative approaches to impact quantification and reporting, the Impact Score emerges as a comprehensive system designed to evaluate and communicate the social and environmental impact of organizations and individuals. Our ambition is to develop a pioneering algorithm that recognizes and records the positive actions of our users on the blockchain, motivating them to realize their full impact potential. This algorithm tracks a variety of behaviors, creating a distinctive Impact Score for each user. This score plays a crucial role in guiding decisions within our community, enhancing trust, and improving resource allocation within our impact ecosystem. Moreover, users are motivated to augment their Impact Score through tangible rewards, including periodic airdrops of SOCIO tokens and access to exclusive opportunities such as financial products and discounted services on our platform. In essence, our system not only measures impact effectively but also actively encourages and rewards positive contributions, fostering a culture of social responsibility and environmental stewardship.
Impact Score on the Blockchain
Distributed ledger technology will bring transparency to the impact scoring process whilst simultaneously ensuring data privacy and efficiency. Decentralization allows users to control their own data without the need to depend on a centrally organized agency deciding their status based on subjective and obscure processes. People who might otherwise be bankless or ineligible for loans would demonstrate their creditworthiness through sustained good deeds, enabling them to access the resources they need to scale their impact. Another attractive feature of blockchain technology is the security that proof of stake (PoS) offers from hacks and data manipulation. Socious’ open-source and peer-to-peer platform will be subject to rigorous checks and audits allowing users to rest assured that they and their data are safe. To date, there have been numerous examples of hacking incidents, with upwards of 100 million Americans’ personal data being exposed. With the Socious Impact Score, this is a problem of the past.
Framework
General
The Socious Impact Score draws on existing impact measurement systems in its design, measuring both single and ongoing events. An amalgamation of on-chain and off-chain features will be automatically incorporated into the data layer to allow the score to be calculated efficiently and accurately. This score will be derived from a number of subcategories, each reflecting a different sphere of impact activities. By adjusting the weightings of these impact spheres, ranging from historical achievements to daily activities, we will be able to offer customized data solutions to fit our clients’ needs.
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