How do we measure impact?
ab
Evidence creation is a pillar of our strategy. We help our partners pinpoint what works and what doesn't to improve resource allocation and resilience outcomes.
Building on our own experience as well as advances in impact research, we’ve developed a framework for measuring impact that aims to address the challenges of evaluating multifaceted interventions in real-world environments.
First, we’ve defined a theory of change for every area in which we provide support. This puts the outcomes that our current (and prospective) grant partners are targeting in context and illuminates their strategies for increasing resilience.
Second, we require partners to self-report on key performance indicators (KPIs) central to our mission. Depending on the focus area and the project, these KPIs – all of which pertain to the grant period – may include:
- Reach. This is the number of targeted people who receive access to knowledge and services (eg increased health literacy, access to healthcare).
- Improved resilience. This is the number of targeted people who experience an improvement in resilience (eg better health indicators, lower out-of-pocket expenses).
- Improved partners. This is the number of partners whose organisations are positively impacted (eg through higher financial revenues or better management processes).
- Environmental impact. This could be the number of tonnes of carbon emissions avoided or the number of square kilometres of natural habitat protected.
- Financial assets mobilised. This is the amount of additional funding (in USD) that the partner acquires.
Third, we commission and share independent third-party assessments of the solutions we enable. The resulting insights and recommendations inform how we select projects going forward and point to ways in which the impact of our current collaborations can be enhanced.
Since 2023 our key partner in impact measurement has been 60_decibels, a global, tech-powered company that takes a customer-centric approach to measuring social impact. By speaking directly to our partners’ customers and other intended beneficiaries, they allow us to hear directly from the people targeted by the solutions we support about their experiences, including what has and hasn’t changed for them and how the solutions could be improved.
Like our partners, with whom we share the detailed findings, we have learned valuable lessons from these studies, including about the groundwork needed for impact research to yield reliable, actionable insights. These include requesting people’s up-front consent to collect their anonymised data for possible research, ensuring representative sampling and controlling for such factors as gender and age where sampling may be biased.
By making the high-level findings of our impact research publicly available, we hope to inspire and support others working to build societal resilience.
To view the 60_decibels reports completed to date, see the links below.
Aggregate report on five Swiss Re Foundation-businesses working to improve healthcare access
Individual reports: