Social impact: Can it be quantified?

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the National Community Investment Fund's (NCIF) Development Banking Conference in Chicago. One of the hot topics among the scores of financial innovators present was measuring and quantifying their success. Creating common tools for quantifying success helps their institutions to evaluate their progress, adjust their programs, and demonstrate impact to investors. Yet social impact is nebulous, and by nature subjective.

Using data from the U.S. Treasury and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, the NCIF has proposed a standard set of metrics to evaluate financial institutions' social impact. The NCIF uses its Social Performance Metrics to evaluate the number and amount of deposits and loans that an institution provides in Census tracts that the U.S. Treasury defines as distressed or highly distressed. This is used to provide a quantitative index of an institution's community impact, which can be evaluated alongside traditional financial indices.

The NCIF metrics are quickly emerging as the community development banking industry's standard indicators of social performance. Collaboration among those institutions, plus clever use of available data, are responsible for this progress.

How can other institutions use already-available data to evaluate their impact? Is this practical on an international level?