3 Key Metrics to Measure the Impact of Your Social Innovation

We recently talked about how to overcome resistance to innovation, and proposed a few strategies to help remove those hurdles. Now the question becomes, how do you know if the solution you are building is achieving its goals?  The key is to track and monitor the progress of your initiative using clearly defined metrics.  The difficult task is choosing the right metrics for your project to ensure success with winning over all of your stakeholders. 

The Stanford Social Innovation Review offers up three levels of metrics to help measure the social impact of projects:

1. Accountability
This is basically reporting the Return on Investment (ROI) to your stakeholders, donors or customers.  These metrics are very similar to those that most commercial organizations would use to track their health and sustainability.

2. Common Standards
In order to distinguish yourself or your product from others, social innovators need to establish standards that can be translated and understood by all constituents so we're all speaking the same language.

3. Integration
Coalesce impact metrics with financial and operational ones. As the Review points out, "Integrated metrics can help organizations develop better products and services, improve resource allocation, and build more efficient and impactful businesses."

How are you measuring the impact of your social innovation? Do you have tips to share?