About Us
We are a trusted, third-party resource that uses the world's leading standard for verifying the outcomes of social programs.
View The Registry
The Standard for Social Impact
Impact Standards
Data Portability
Verification
Social Impact as an Asset
Benchmarking
Level the Playing Field
A 30-year passion project
We started this work in 1994. Since that day, we have been monocularly focused on answering one question: what works?
The journey began with the launch of the Center for What Works, a nonprofit organization started by Impact Genome CEO Jason Saul, while at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In 2005, Jason launched a consulting firm, Mission Measurement (MM), to advise funders and nonprofits on how to measure their impact. From day one, MM kept a database of outcomes that they measured for clients – eventually resulting in a list of 77,000 outcomes. But when MM de-duplicated the wording, they realized that there were, in fact, only 132 common outcomes in the entire social sector.
This led to the creation of the Impact Genome Project®, which developed the world’s first standardized impact taxonomies. Over time, funders began using the Impact Genome Project to evaluate their grants. So, we built a centralized database where nonprofits could report their impact, just once, for all funders–which became the Impact Genome Registry.
With the introduction of the Registry and Impact Standards, the world now has a way to standardize and verify impact, the future possibilities are endless: outcome markets, indexes, benchmark data, prediction, better ROI, and what matters most: helping more people get outcomes for every dollar spent.
Leadership Team
Impact Genome is advised by some of the world’s most prominent social scientists, economists, statisticians, and data entrepreneurs.
