Income is Impact

Sometimes, it seems like there are as many ways to measure social impact as there are social ventures. At Samasource, we experimented with various methods, including the Social Return on Investment (SROI) calculation advocated by business plan competitions and the World Bank's Social Impact Analysis methods. But most of our efforts didn't seem to garner much interest from donors. No one really cared about the total value of our work measured in dollars.

So, at the urging of Ken Starr at Mulago, we decided to measure the only thing that really matters to our mission: how much an investment in Samasource increases income for one of our beneficiaries. Here are the inputs we considered in our first take:

• Wage Benefits to Our Partners' Existing Employees (Average annual benefit to employee based on pilot results; Annual wage increase per dollar invested in Samasource in our first year of ops)
  
• Wage Benefits to Our Partners' New Employees (Jobs created in pilot; Average increase in new employee compensation per dollar invested in Samasource in our first year of ops)
  
• Training Benefits to New and Existing Employees (Amount invested in training per worker per year, Increase in future earning potential per $ invested in training)
  

The model we use makes assumptions based on performance in our first year of operations, and based on proxy data from India and poor regions in the US. It's obviously not perfect, or even very scientific, but I believe that we're not too far off the mark.

Anyway, here's the figure we came up with: for every $1 invested in Samasource, we increase the income of a beneficiary by $16 over a 10-year period.