Paul Wilkinson recently blogged about day 3 of the recent XBRL Summit at Santa Clara, CA and had some great points to make about Steve Wright’s presentation on Impact Investing. This in turn reminded me that taxonomy-based reporting – the kind of reporting that Crossfire Reporting Platform natively supports –  is not just about financial numbers but also about standardizing any kind of useful business performance metrics, such as those proposed by IRIS – the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards body. IRIS is an effort to create a common framework for defining, tracking and reporting the performance of impact capital.

This effort is synergistic in many ways with Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard idea, which reminded organizations that performance measurement is not just about measuring financial performance. IRIS adds new operational indicators that focus on metrics relating to Governance, Community, Jobs and Environment. The good thing about basing all this on a taxonomy is that it will make Impact Analysis – comparing and contrasting the social impact of global organizations – that much easier to do.