The Impact Valuation Hub (IV Hub) is the only go-to community of practice for helping to deploy impact valuation and monetization in practice at the fund level. We are uniquely filling in this gap in the ecosystem, building off existing principles and frameworks to make impact valuation practical for investors.

Measuring and valuing impact can be tricky, fragmented, and time-consuming. The IV Hub brings together proven methods, data, and tools so investors can measure and value both positive and negative impacts in a consistent way and use that information to guide capital toward better outcomes. It provides a space for investors to share best practice and a community alongside which to experiment with and further the field of impact valuation.

The IV Hub is an investor-driven coalition, created by and for investors, to deliver practical tools that investors can directly use. Founded by Astanor, Summa Equity, and Wire Group, it brings investors together with all the leading international organizations in impact valuation such as Social Value International (SVI), the Capitals Coalition, the International Foundation for Valuing Impacts (IFVI), and specialized knowledge partners like Impact Institute and Valuing Impact, to harmonize and integrate the field's best-established practices, from SVI's Social Value Principles to the Capitals Coalition's multi-capital approach, into a practical and accessible set of resources.

Yes, the IV Hub takes a holistic approach to impact valuation, integrating broader sustainability dimensions rather than treating them separately. ESG factors can be embedded directly into the assessment, for example, a company's carbon footprint or the wages it pays employees can be converted into monetary terms and valued as part of the overall impact.

Impact valuation sits at the core of this approach, but we explicitly encourage users to frame their analysis in the context of broader considerations such as ESG risks, governance factors, CSR goals, or SDG targets. In practice, this means when you define the scope and objectives of an impact assessment, you consider your organization's wider goals and regulatory drivers (e.g. ESG reporting requirements or SDG commitments) so that the impact valuation complements and integrates with those broader indicators. The result is an assessment that not only measures impact in monetary terms but also aligns with your overall sustainability strategy.

The IV Hub approach makes a point of looking at all outcomes – not just the intended positive ones.

Practitioners are expected to consider potential negative and unintended consequences alongside the positive impacts. If primary data isn’t available, impact valuation allows for the use of secondary data to provide an overall view of both positive and negative effects and to identify the most material impacts. If certain potentially important impacts (especially negative ones) can’t be quantified due to lack of data or other feasibility issues, the methodology says to be transparent about it – disclose what’s omitted and why, along with any risks that entails.

There are also checks in place to catch what might be missed: the approach recommends working closely with portfolio companies (who often know where the side effects might be) and even getting an outside expert or evaluator to review the assessment.

This way, any unintended or harmful impacts are identified and factored into the overall evaluation, rather than ignored.

Impact is never generated in isolation - investors, value-chain partners all contribute in some way to the positive and negative impact generated by a company. Attribution is about assigning a share of the total impact created to a particular investor or investment. 

Today, there is growing consensus that ownership share (e.g., an investor's equity stake) provides a credible baseline for attribution. However, more nuanced questions remain on topics such as:

• Horizontal attribution: how to recognize the role of different actors along the value chain

• Financing structures: how to attribute impact where debt or blended instruments are involved

• Time horizons: how to treat impact that persists or evolves post-exit

The Impact Valuation Hub is actively convening a working group on attribution to examine these issues and develop emerging best practices. In the meantime, a core principle covered in the IV Hub’s playbook is ‘Do not overclaim’, which means acknowledging the investor’s contribution proportionately and transparently, without exaggeration.

To strike this balance, the IV Hub encourages starting with a broad view of potential impacts—using primary or secondary data as available—so that both positive and negative effects can be surfaced. From there, practitioners apply materiality and focus, narrowing the scope to the impacts and stakeholders that are most relevant for decision-making. This way, the process stays manageable, while still ensuring that no important issues are overlooked, and the results remain actionable.

Moreover, the IV Hub advocates an iterative, learning-by-doing approach rather than perfection at first attempt. “Just start. Don’t wait for the perfect moment or the perfect model. Begin with what you have, learn as you go.”

This encouragement to start small and refine over time keeps the process user-friendly – you can begin an impact valuation with available data and reasonable assumptions, then improve the depth and accuracy in subsequent rounds as more information becomes available. The IV Hub playbook provides tips for practicality, such as using proxy values or industry research when primary data is lacking, and gradually enhancing accuracy (for example, start by measuring outputs with known proxies and work toward collecting actual outcome data).

Impact valuation – valuing social and environmental outcomes in monetary terms – is a powerful tool in investors’ decision-making arsenal. It enables investors to see and compare the impact performance of investments in a common language (money), similar to how financial returns are compared.

Here are key ways impact valuation supports investor decision-making (including using sector-level assessments as an example):

• Informed Investment Selection: Use impact valuation in due diligence to compare potential investments by their impact results and future impact potential.
  
  

• Portfolio & Sector Strategy: At the portfolio level, impact valuation reveals which holdings or sectors create the most impact per unit of investment. Investors can rebalance toward high-impact sectors and reduce exposure to those with negative externalities. For investors with a specific sector focus - e.g. agriculture, the built environment- investors can use sector impact information to identify the biggest issues in the sector and design strategies to address them.
  
  

• Impact Optimization: impact valuation pinpoints which outcomes contribute most to an investment’s total social value (and which cause costs). This helps investors and companies prioritize improvements. They can bolster activities that drive high positive impact and address areas causing societal costs, continuously improving impact performance over time.
  
  

• Clear Communication & Accountability: A monetary impact metric (e.g. an “impact return on investment”) makes it easier to report and track impact. Investors can communicate a concrete Impact Multiple on Invested Capital (IMoIC) – a ratio of realised impact at exit over the invested amount – alongside financial metrics, demonstrating to stakeholders the extra societal value created. This fosters transparency and allows setting impact targets and measuring progress in financial terms.
  
  

Reputation & Fundraising: Embracing rigorous impact valuation showcases an investor’s commitment to measurable impact, strengthening their reputation with clients and partners. It provides credible data to attract values-driven funders – when an investor can plainly show the social return their portfolio delivered, impact-focused LPs are more likely to come on board. Some investors even tie bonuses or carry to impact results; impact valuation supplies the metrics for aligning incentives with impact goals.

Any time you link compensation or rewards to metrics, there’s a temptation for people to game those metrics – and impact is no exception. A key principle to manage this risk is transparency: all assumptions and calculations should be clear, and negative impacts together with assumptions should be reported, not hidden. For example, the IV Hub Playbook explicitly warns against simply netting out negative impacts against positive ones without disclosure – you shouldn’t mask a project’s downsides by cancelling them out with its upsides in one aggregate figure. Doing so could mislead stakeholders and amount to impact “greenwashing.” Instead, positive and negative impacts should be presented clearly (you might show them separately) so that nothing is swept under the rug. Additionally, the process encourages using conservative estimates and having results validated (even by third parties if possible) to ensure they stand up to scrutiny. By keeping impact valuation rigorous and honest in this way, it reduces the incentive or ability to artificially inflate impact results for reward purposes. The goal is that if incentives are tied to impact, they’re tied to real, verified impact, thus actually driving positive change rather than just better-looking numbers.

The IV Hub recommends a full value-chain view of impact. When you scope an impact assessment, one of the decisions you make is what part of the value chain to cover – just the company’s direct operations, or also upstream suppliers and downstream users/customers. So if the upstream or downstream impact is likely to be material, you should extend the analysis to include supply chain impacts (like the sourcing of raw materials) and end-of-life or customer usage impacts, not just what happens within the factory or office. In practice, many impact investors do look at the broader value chain because significant social and environmental effects often occur outside the company’s four walls. By considering the full value chain, you get a more complete picture of an investment’s impact footprint. The methodology is flexible on this front: you set the boundaries according to what makes sense for the question you’re trying to answer, ensuring important indirect impacts aren’t overlooked.

Converting outputs to outcomes is a critical step in impact valuation. Outputs are the immediate, measurable results of an activity (e.g. number of products sold, tons of waste treated, people reached by a service), whereas outcomes are the actual changes experienced by people or the environment as a result (e.g. improved health, emissions reduced, income increased). The IV Hub Playbook presents the concept of impact pathways: starting from inputs and outputs of an investment, one maps forward to the outcomes and ultimately the impact (the change versus a baseline or reference scenario). Typically, measuring outputs is straightforward – companies usually track these as part of their operations (for instance, a training program knows how many people attended). The challenge lies in moving from those outputs to quantifying the outcomes (how many people actually got new jobs after the training, how much did incomes rise, etc.).

There are a couple of approaches to do so:

• Use of research and secondary data. For example, environmental outputs like tons of CO₂ can be converted to outcomes using scientific factors (e.g. how does a ton of CO₂ affect climate indicators). LCA (Lifecycle cycle assessments) are a common approach. It is recommended to use peer-reviewed or validated studies over single-studies.

• Primary data collection: Where feasible, an alternative way  is to collect outcome data directly - for instance by conducting surveys to measure changes in well-being or behavior among people affected. This might involve following up with beneficiaries (patients, customers, etc.) to gather data on actual changes attributable to the product or service. Primary data provides tailored evidence of outcome but can be resource-intensive.

Rigor in this process is maintained through transparency and continual improvement. Initially, an investor might start with rough estimates (for instance, using industry-average outcome rates), which provides a directionally correct valuation of impact. These estimates are made credible by citing sources or evidence for the conversion factors used, and by clearly stating any assumptions. Over time, the goal is to increase rigor: the methodology encourages investors to gradually collect more outcome data from investees to refine these estimations. For example, if in year 1 you estimated health outcomes from a new medical device using literature values, by year 3 you might have direct patient health data to update the valuation.