The Impact Management Project and what it shares with effective giving

When we give, we want to know whether our donation really makes a difference. Impact professionals have been asking the same question for years, and they eventually agreed on a shared method: the Impact Management Project and its five dimensions of impact.

Félix Beaulieu

Director of Philanthropy · Mieux Donner · Reading time: 9 min

The methods we use at Mieux Donner to choose the charities we recommend ask the same questions. They also go one step further: they let us compare charities with one another, so we can choose where a donation will do the most good.

What is the Impact Management Project?

The Impact Management Project (IMP) was an international initiative launched in 2016 around a simple question: how can we know whether an action really has a positive effect? It was incubated by Bridges, a British impact fund manager, and wound down as planned at the end of 2021.

Between 2016 and 2018, the IMP brought together a community of more than 2,000 practitioners: investors, companies and other organisations from around the world. They reached a shared conclusion. Any impact, on people or on the planet, can be described along five dimensions.

• What: what change occurs, and how much it matters.
• Who: who experiences that change.
• How Much: how many people, to what extent, and for how long.
• Contribution: what would not have happened without the action.
• Risk: the likelihood that the result falls short.

Since the project ended, its resources have been hosted by Impact Frontiers, a collaboration of investors that keeps them alive. The framework therefore comes from impact finance, where it has become the common frame of reference.

A framework that became a benchmark

The five dimensions are now used well beyond the circle that designed them. In the 2020 survey by the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), impact investors placed the IMP among the three frameworks they used most, alongside the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the IRIS+ catalogue of metrics.

In France, the Forum pour l’Investissement Responsable (FIR) and France Invest, which set up its Impact committee back in 2012, published a joint reference framework in 2021: Investissement à impact : une définition exigeante pour le coté et le non-coté (“Impact investing: a demanding definition for listed and unlisted assets”). It rests on three pillars (intentionality, additionality and measurement) and lists the IMP and its five dimensions among its reference frameworks. Its definition of additionality asks the same question as the Contribution dimension: what would have changed had this investor not funded the project?

At European level, Impact Europe and GSG Impact formed a consortium in 2021 with the national impact investing networks of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. In 2024, the consortium published a consensus paper, The 5 Ws of Impact Investing. It builds on the IMP’s classification of enterprises and recommends adding the five dimensions to it.

These professional bodies use the framework for a specific reason: to separate investments that really do good from those that merely claim to.

The five dimensions, one by one

At Mieux Donner, we rely on the work of independent evaluators. An evaluator is a specialist organisation that studies charities and programmes in depth, then publishes its calculations. The best known is GiveWell, founded in the United States in 2007, which assesses health and poverty programmes.

For other causes, we follow Animal Charity Evaluators on animals, Giving Green on climate and Longview Philanthropy on catastrophic risks, among others. We compare their methods and do not give all their recommendations the same weight (our method in detail).

Their approach answers the IMP’s questions one dimension at a time.

What: what change, and how much it matters

The IMP first asks what change an action produces, and how much it matters to the people affected. In effective giving, the starting point is to map the chain that links an action to its result: the theory of change. Distributing insecticide-treated bed nets, for instance, reduces night-time bites, which reduces malaria cases, which in turn reduces child deaths.

The next step is to decide how to compare different kinds of outcome. Saving a life and doubling a family’s income do not compare easily. GiveWell settles the question with explicit “moral weights”, which it publishes.

Who: who is affected, and are they already well served?

The IMP then asks who experiences the change, and whether those people already receive good support. Effective giving calls this neglectedness: a euro goes further where few resources are already invested.

This is one reason why New Incentives, which encourages childhood vaccination in Nigeria, can achieve more than a charity working on a cause that already attracts plenty of funding.

How Much: how many people, to what extent, for how long

This dimension combines the scale, depth and duration of change. All three sit at the heart of cost-effectiveness models, which estimate how much good each euro donated produces.

In health, the most widely used unit is the DALY, which counts years of healthy life lost. The World Health Organization has used it for decades. GiveWell also measures its results against a simple benchmark: giving cash directly to very poor people, an intervention proven to be highly effective that helps more than many of the alternatives. A programme rated “10 times” does as much good with €100 as a direct transfer of €1,000.

Contribution: what would not have happened without the donation

The IMP distinguishes between a company’s contribution and its investor’s contribution. For a donor, the investor’s side is what matters: what does my donation change, compared with what would have happened without it?

This is probably the dimension effective giving stresses most. Before recommending a charity, evaluators check that it can use additional funds and that another funder would not have covered the programme anyway. GiveWell even adjusts its estimates when a donation risks replacing money from a government or a foundation rather than adding to it.

Risk: what if the result falls short?

The IMP asks how likely it is that impact will differ from expectations, and distinguishes nine types of risk. For a donor, the most important is evidence risk: is the data solid enough to tell us what is really happening?

Evaluators respond by applying discounts to their estimates. When an effect has been observed in a single study, or in another country, they revise it downwards according to how likely it is to be replicated elsewhere. Another risk on the IMP’s list, efficiency risk, asks whether the same impact could have been achieved with fewer resources. That is exactly the question of cost-effectiveness.

Summary

What effective giving adds: from description to choice

The five dimensions already make it possible to compare actions that pursue the same goal. Impact Frontiers makes this point itself: among companies that generate income for poor communities, you can identify those producing the deepest change. However, the framework leaves each investor to choose their own goal, and it does not say whether funding health is better than funding employment.

For an investor, impact is also weighed alongside financial return. For a donor, impact is the only return that counts, and each euro given will go to a single charity out of thousands. That is why we take the approach all the way, in two steps.

This prioritisation does not come down to a single score. Our evaluators cross-reference several criteria: cost-effectiveness, what would have happened without the intervention, the strength of the scientific evidence and, for charities, their transparency.

However, we do not claim to rank these four causes on a single scale, and the comparison between them happens at the level of the problems. According to the FAO, around 80 billion land animals are slaughtered for food every year, most of them after a life in factory farming. This immense suffering remains badly underfunded, even though it can be reduced at low cost. The Humane League, for example, has secured commitments from more than 400 companies to stop using eggs from caged hens.

Weighing this progress against children’s lives saved, or against reducing the risks to future generations, means deciding how much weight to give each one. These are value judgements on which reasonable people disagree. So we present you with several very strong options, and we can help you divide your giving according to your own priorities.

This extra step, comparing and then choosing, is what allows us to offer a short selection of charities rather than a long list of good intentions.

Five questions to ask before you give

Scaled down to a single donation, the five dimensions become five questions you can put to any charity.

These questions are a good habit to get into. Answering them properly, though, takes data and careful analysis of the studies, sometimes even commissioning new ones, followed by a comparison across dozens of options. That is the work we do for you, drawing on a network of evaluators and researchers.