What It Takes to Clear 75 Points

We ask two questions about every organization we review. Can they show that the people they serve are living better lives because of their work? And has anyone checked what would have happened otherwise?

Almost everything else follows from those two.

The Scorecard

Learning carries the most weight, which surprises people. We weight it that way on purpose. An organization that measures carefully and changes course when the evidence disappoints will keep improving after we stop watching. One that posts a good result and never asks again will not.

The Distinction That Does Most of the Work

Most organizations report their activities and counts of what they do. Far fewer report outcomes that describe a changed life.

Consider a program that gets a girl into school. And then what? She learns to read. And then what? She finishes school. And then what? She finds work. And then what? Her life is genuinely better.

Everything before that last step is an intermediate outcome. Only the last step is an ultimate outcome. Most organizations stop reporting three steps too early when the girl gets into school, then present that stopping point as the destination.

Two tools let you do this yourself.

The "and then what?" test. After any claimed result, ask it. If a natural answer exists, the thing you are looking at is intermediate. The chain ends when the only answer left is that someone's life is genuinely better.

The "in itself" test. Some things we value because of what they lead to. Others we value in themselves. Income is valuable because of what it buys, so it is intermediate. Health, dignity, safety, belonging, hope: these we want for their own sake. They are ultimate.

Applied honestly, this reclassifies a great deal of what the sector calls impact. Enrollment is access. Graduation is a transition. Higher income is a resource. Jobs created, meals served, loans repaid, clinics visited: all real, all worth doing, none of them evidence that a life improved.

Why the Bar is 75 and Not Some Other Number

It is not a round number we liked. It is a consequence of the arithmetic.

An organization that never measures an ultimate outcome scores zero on that criterion. It also cannot have an ultimate outcome counterfactual, which caps the counterfactual criterion at half. Add up everything else available and the ceiling is 70.

What the Score Means, and What It Does Not

We are primarily interested in the quality of an organization's measurement of ultimate outcomes, its humility to learn what works and what doesn't, and its ability to change course based on that. These organizations don't do this to appease a funder. They do this measurement-learning-adaptation cycle because they want to increase the number of their clients whose lives actually improve.

An organization that runs a rigorous trial and reports a disappointing result scores higher with us than one reporting encouraging numbers nobody checked. We think that is the right incentive. The alternative rewards organizations for avoiding hard questions, which is how the sector got to where it is.

So read a score as an answer to "does this organization know whether it works, and would it tell you if it didn't?" Read the review itself for what they found.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Our reviews include what organizations cannot yet show, and the things they would rather we left out.

Shamiri Institute, scored 100, delivers mental health care to Kenyan adolescents through trained lay providers and has strong published effect sizes. It also published a later trial in which its own comparison condition improved so much that the advantage narrowed. We put that in the review.

Pivot Madagascar, scored 100, strengthens a district health system and has a decade of published mortality data behind it. It also funded research finding that its own flagship intervention is insufficient on its own, because travel time to a facility still predicts whether a child survives. That is in the review too.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, scored 100, has submitted the same program to randomized trials thirty years apart. An independent clearinghouse rates it highly promising rather than top tier, citing attrition that could undermine the randomization. We say so.

Water Access Rwanda, scored 100, reports that households using its kiosks are far less likely to report waterborne illness. That study is unpublished, conducted by the organization itself, with no methodology we have been able to review. We say that as well.

And some organizations do not clear the bar. They are listed at the bottom of the Impact Market page. Most of them fail at exactly one point: they can show that people used a product or service and cannot show that anyone's life improved because of it.

A certification body that has never published a failing grade is a marketing operation. We certify organizations.

Who Is Doing the Scoring

Todd and Kristine Manwaring have worked in social impact since 1997. Between them they have founded or co-founded five social problem-solving organizations that have worked with more than 75 million people and raised and invested over $1 billion. Kristine spent her career in data, assessment, and evaluation, finishing as Director of Institutional Research and Assessment at Brigham Young University. Todd founded Brigham Young University's Melvin J. Ballard Center for Social Impact and taught social impact as a professor of practice. Together they co-founded Unitus.

We have spent most of our careers on the other side of this table, reporting activity numbers because that is what we had and what funders asked for. That is part of why we built this.

The Few, and the Thousands

The Impact Market's list of certified social impact organizations grows each week. It isn't a finished product. We are working toward reviewing thousands and expect somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 to clear 75.

Go Deeper

The full protocol, one page per step:

• Start With the Wound — defining a social problem in five words, and its twenty negative consequences
• Intermediate or Ultimate — the full classification, with a sorting exercise
• Is the Theory Credible — causal chains and the starting-point test
• What Are They Actually Measuring — direct evidence, and the four things that do not count
• Would It Have Happened Anyway — the counterfactual hierarchy
• Does Learning Change Anything — what a real feedback loop looks like