About Social Impact Research

Social Impact Research conducts independent research on social issues and organizational performance to provide leaders in the nonprofit, foundation, government, and business sectors with the actionable information they need to make strategic decisions about creating and investing in social impact.

To ensure billions of current dollars and trillions of dollars invested in nonprofit organizations over the next fifty years result in significant social impact, a reliable and efficient social impact market needs to be developed that rewards performance with investment.

What is the problem?

Private sector comparison

We’ve seen this before - the investment information gap in the social sector today mirrors a similar gap during the rise of the technology market in the late 1970s. At that time, significant capital was available to invest in start-up companies, but investors lacked an understanding of industry trends, “hot” companies, and performance on a comparative level. This information gap was decreased by the emergence of companies such as Yankee Group, Forrester, and Gartner Research. In the social sector, this information gap still exists.

Why is there this information gap?

Despite progress in the social sector in recognizing the need for funding nonprofits based on performance, there are significant challenges in adopting measurement practices. Unlike the private sector, the social sector lacks established performance indicators and benchmarks, so impact data are notoriously difficult and expensive to collect and measure.

What is SIR doing to address it?

SIR is actively working to close this gap. Modeled after private sector research firms, SIR aggregates actionable information on social issues and recommends non-profits with proven performance based on data to help investors make informed philanthropic decisions.