Despite the importance of social impact to social entrepreneurship research, standards for measuring an organization’s social impact are underdeveloped on both theoretical and empirical grounds. We identify a sample of 71 relevant papers from leading (FT50) business journals that examine, conceptually or empirically, the measurement of social impact. We first describe the breadth of definitions, data sources, and operationalizations of social impact. Based on this analysis, we generate a typology of four approaches to conceptualizing social impact, which we use to organize insights and recommendations regarding improved measurement of the social impact of entrepreneurial ventures.

In the Global North, where social entrepreneurs and their stakeholders agree that social enterprise needs to do more for stakeholders than traditional business, social entrepreneurs balancing financial and pro-social goals seek to avoid mission drift by being responsive to their stakeholders. In many areas of the Global South, despite the work of NGOs and foreign aid, social problems remain persistent and pervasive, so social entrepreneurs face vastly different stakeholder demands. Our qualitative study of 36 social entrepreneurs in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda builds on behavioral theory to understand how social entrepreneurs balance pro-social and financial goals in this context. We find that they experience a mismatch between their social impact aspirations and the expectations of stakeholders, which leads to concerns of Impact Drift, which we define as the decoupling of pro-social actions from enduring social impact outcomes. Concerns of impact drift prompt a norm-breaking approach to social impact, involving orchestrating novel coalitions of stakeholders and employing heuristics to limit their focus and reassure them about their approach.