Social impact measurement practices : A meta-analysis

Every type of organization is driven by the needs of the stakeholders and of the social environment that surrounds them. In particular, organizations need to satisfy requirements deriving both from internal stakeholders. In addition, every activity generates different kind of outcomes, positive or negative, intended or unintended, financial and non-financial: Social Impact can define the sum of all these outcomes, net of the effect of synergies and of what would have happened even in the absence of the activity of the organization. In this framework, on the one hand any organization needs guidelines to maximize this social impact and instruments to assess and evaluate it, in order to embed it in a Rational Management system. On the other hand, governments and local policy makers need to know which kind of impacts, and to what extent, organizations generate, in order to produce regulations, policies and facilitations to promote, foster and reward who produce better for the Society, and vice versa discourage who affects it negatively. Both the researchers and the practitioners have lately produced a vastness of instruments with this purpose, whose usage extension is often limited to single local communities or organizations. This contribution aims to recap all the present reviews made in the scientific literature that tried to classify, cluster and reduce to common factors all the instruments, methodologies and measures, through a meta-review of the existing literature