The Impact Database (ImpactDB) is a non-profit data initiative which aims to curate and encourage analysis of datasets of interest to the impact investment community.
The website was created in April 2024 by Daniel Rosehill1 with the encouragement of Sir Ronald Cohen2 and the generous cooperation of data-producing entities3 who kindly consented to the reproduction of their datasets here.
Impact investing is about trying to make the financial system work for everyone — particularly those in the most disadvantaged communities on earth.
Whether you’re a journalist looking to report on impact, an academic looking to understand how impact differs from ESG, or just curious to know what impact-weighted accounting might look like in practice, we hope that this resource helps in some small way.
Impact Data Visualisation: It’s About More Than Fancy Charts
Data visualisation can help to underscore trends that are easy to miss when looking at columns of numbers — or to show relationships between variables that aren’t apparent at first glance.
And with $4TN standing between where we are now and where we need to be to close the SDG funding gap, impact investing is all about looking at the big picture.
To get your data visualization mojo in train, here’s an example dataset showing product impact (green bar charts) plotted against total monetised product impact (the red lines).
It was derived from the Impact Weighted Accounts Initiative’s product impact dataset.
Some Tips For Viewing The Data Visualisations Here:
Here are some general pointers for how to derive maximum value from this website:
✅ Hover over a datapoint to call up information for a particular company.
✅ For the best browsing experience, access this website from a non-mobile device, like a laptop computer. Many of the visualisations posted here wont’ look the best on a small screen.
✅ There are “view in full screen” buttons to try make that easier.
? We’re working on better segmenting the data according to users’ likely interests. But for the moment … it’s a data firehose. Click through the menus to try narrow down to what you’re looking for.
And Finally …. Here’s A Graph To Look At!
Behold a real live data visualisation!
What’s This Data All About, Then?
Here’s what’s above:
- Product impact accounting has proposed “monetising” the health impacts of companies on their consumers (among other factors). It’s an interesting idea which means finding ways to capture the impacts that products have on their consumers’ health and putting a dollar value on it.
- Another way impact-weighted accounting has sought to quantify product impact is through gauging its affordability. Lifesaving medicines can’t save lives, after all, if those who need them can’t afford them. But how can we capture that information in financial accounts?
If we look at a narrower slice of the data — for example by filtering on the CPG sector — we can see something interesting.
In IWAI’s analysis, only one company (General Mills) had both positive EBITDA and positive net “product impact.”
…. And Here’s Something To Think About ?
For every other company in the CPG sector, if the (negative) effects of their products were brought into financial accounts, it would wipe out their profitability. Conventional accounting methdologies are leaving an awful lot of impacts go unaccounted for.
It’s worth pointing out too: the process of formulating impact-weighting accounting methodologies is ongoing, evolving, and subject to ongoing change. Nothing is set in stone. Everything is tenative.
Groups like the International Foundation for Valuing Impacts are engaging in wide consultative processes to understand what ideas are out there and to try propose some mutually-agreeable standards.
If you’re interested in the idea, check out their site and engage with their process.
? Try Working With The Data Yourself!
Now it’s time to finally get off the couch and start doing something. This site exists to nurture data-curiosity and we’re happy to have you along on the journey.
If you like working in SQL, there’s a data sandbox pre-loaded with the datasets mentioned on this frontend that you can query directly.
Or if you prefer working with data by dragging-and-dropping, you can do that too.
Or you can just read the blog posts (we’re working on recruiting authors from our community of data buddies. It will just take a while to get things set up).
And finally — here’s the data referenced above in CSV if you’d like to go through it offline.
Caveat Data Viewer: ImpactDB Is Made Available On A ‘Best Effort’ Basis
Rather than write legalese, we’d rather give a natural language definition of the scope and limitations of this undertaking:
The Impact Database was never intended to be a definitive collection of the world’s impact-related data (this is a task that’s not only monumental but also probably impossible).
Rather, it is intended to provoke curiosity ? and analysis ? among small selections of data that has been provided, kindly, by those who originally collected it.
We will try to keep the data here updated. But committing to doing so forever and to the kind of degree you might expect from a professional data provider is way beyond what’s possible or realistic. So buyer beware! Or rather: it’s a good idea to validate this data externally.
If you want more details about the project, there’s an about’ page.
To get in touch, please use this form.
(Text, unless otherwise stated, authored by Daniel Rosehill who’s just a guy who believes in data visualisation. But writing in the first person for a homepage would feel weird..)
? Note: This website is in active development and our data sandbox is currently invite-only. Please bear with us while we work on our presentation, fix typos, and chat with changemakers! ?
Footnotes Referenced Above
- Daniel works for Sir Ronald but is otherwise just a guy who believes in impact investing, likes open-source tech and data, and has long wondered “why don’t we try to visualise some of the datasets in impact investing?” This website is the output of that experiment in progress ↩︎
- Ronnie is a pivotal figure in the world of impact investing but this website is an independent initiative. Ronnie’s book is called “Impact Investing: Reshaping Capitalism To Drive Real Change“. It provides a great basis for understanding some of the frameworks presented here ↩︎
- A “data producing entity” isn’t an underworld mob figure but rather an organisation that collates data and publishes datasets on the internet. We would call these DPEs but don’t wish to contribute any further to the sprawling web of acronyms in impact. ↩︎
The Impact Database is licensed under CC BY 4.0
