Measuring What Matters - or What Can Be Measured? Social Impact as Sensemaking

Abstract

Social impact measurement is critically important in many kinds of organisations, particularly hybrid organisations with a social mission. Practitioners struggle with impact measurement and management (IMM). Social IMM involves the complex task of balancing meaningful impact assessment with metrics that are practical yet sufficiently reflective of key values. The study examines social IMM as a sensemaking accomplishment. What is presented as social impact is shaped by the sense-making of what counts as social impact and what is feasible to measure. Drawing on qualitative analysis of public social impact communications from three hybrid company cases, the study investigates how social impact is made meaningful, which forms of impact become measurable, and which meanings are more implicit. The analysis proceeds in three phases: first, examining how organisations construct meanings of social impact, then how they argue these meanings. This study analyses how certain interpretations are measurable or reportable. Third, the findings are synthesized to reflect the sensemaking of social impact to advance theoretical perspectives.  Social impact presentations reveal traces of meaning that go beyond what is formally documented or quantified. Quantitative indicators tend to foreground discrete outcomes, while more processual, relational, and long-term impacts can also be acknowledged rhetorically. Public impact communications play a central role in legitimizing particular interpretations of impact. By conceptualising social impact measurement as a sensemaking process, this study underscores the construction of social impact meanings. The central challenge in IMM is mediating between assignable outcomes and diffuse systemic transformations. The study highlights the need for greater reflexivity about how meaning, attention, and resources shape what counts as social impact.