Creating Objectivity in Social Entrepreneurship Impact Reporting Where There Is None

Impact measurement has become a prominent concern in social entrepreneurship theory and practice. Social investors and donors increasingly expect objective, impartial, quantitative, and comparable accounts of a social enterprise’s social impact as a precondition to providing support. Yet these expectations have proven to be a challenge for many social entrepreneurs. For many social entrepreneurs, impact measurement requires unfamiliar capabilities and threatens to divert scarce resources to the endeavor. This paper studies social entrepreneurs’ responses to these challenges, revealing a framework of five connected strategies social entrepreneurs use to demonstrate and justify their social impact. Of particular interest, we identified a process whereby social entrepreneurs use intuitive judgments derived from stories of experiences and pre-existing operational data to demonstrate a social venture’s resemblance to a set of