Square Research Center

About the partnership

In 2024–2025, MRC partnered with the Square Research Center to co-develop an innovative quantitative methodology for measuring the social impact of companies and investment portfolios. The result of this collaboration — the Sustainable Development Goals Impact Assessment (SDGIA) — is a six-step algorithmic framework designed to bring methodological rigor, operational pragmatism, and cross-portfolio comparability to social impact measurement in sustainable finance. The SDGIA was developed to improve the cost-to-reliability ratio of impact estimation — making rigorous measurement more accessible without sacrificing scientific integrity. It was designed specifically for impact funds, taking into account the time and resource constraints of investment teams, while remaining grounded in the academic literature at each step.

The full methodological guide published below is available in open access to practitioners, researchers, and all interested stakeholders.

The SDGIA Methodology

The SDGIA structures social impact analysis through six sequential steps:

• Impact declaration analysis : the starting point is a careful examination of the company’s own stated impact objectives and theory of change, providing the analytical frame for subsequent steps.
• Stakeholder identification : all parties affected by the company’s activity — directly or indirectly — are mapped, establishing the full perimeter of potential impact.
• Key stakeholder selection : from the full stakeholder map, the analysis identifies those whose experience of the company’s impact is most significant and most measurable, focusing analytical effort where it matters most.
• Qualitative impact channel description : for each key stakeholder group, the pathways through which the company’s activity generates impact are described qualitatively, grounding the subsequent quantitative analysis in a rigorous causal logic.
• Relevant impact indicator determination : drawing on the scientific literature, the most appropriate indicators for measuring impact on each key stakeholder group are identified and justified.
• Stakeholder impact evaluation : impact is assessed quantitatively for each key stakeholder group, using the SDGs as a common reference framework — translating company-level activities into marginal changes in well-being at a given territorial scale.

By anchoring measurement in the SDG indicators as a common unit of social well-being, the SDGIA enables comparison across companies pursuing different social objectives and aggregation across holdings at fund level. Scientific literature is mobilized at each step to maintain rigor while containing analytical costs. The methodology is illustrated in the guide through application to two companies.

Positioning and complementarity

The SDGIA is presented not as a definitive solution but as a rigorous contribution to an ongoing collective effort. Its methodological choices are documented in full and explicitly open to discussion and refinement by practitioner and academic communities. It sits within a broader landscape of approaches to social impact measurement — including the CIFRE doctoral research hosted by MRC, which explores alternative methods of company-level impact assessment and fund-level aggregation — and is intended to complement rather than displace existing frameworks.