Measuring and Improving Social Impacts

5How Social Impacts Are Created

There are many approaches organizations can take to generate social impact, and different types of organizations create impacts in different ways. These variations are particularly noticeable in the way nonprofits and for-profits produce impacts. Nonprofits and social enterprises focus on the impacts they make through their products and services, while for-profit companies mostly focus on impacts they make through their operations. Some nonprofits thus consider their primary social impacts to result from consumers or beneficiaries using their products, while companies tend to see their primary social impacts coming from the way they source and produce products.

In general, social purpose organizations take a narrow ...