Two popular platforms that provide investors with critical information are IRIS+ and Gold Standard. The Gold Standard, established in 2003 by WWF and other international NGOs, was created to “ensure projects that reduced carbon emissions featured the highest levels of environmental integrity and also contributed to sustainable development.” (Geneva Environment Network) Formally known as IRIS, IRIS+ is a publicly available system that has been managed by the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) since 2009. They are both known for their key impact performance indicators that can be used by investors to help them better assess the effects of their investments. These effects are most commonly related to social and environmental factors such as health, education, and water purity. 

IRIS+ is a more well-known system that is used for “measuring, managing, and optimizing the impact of various organization efforts.” Its main purpose is to minimize confusion in setting objectives, understanding impact, measuring success, and communicating impact performance with other impact investing stakeholders. In doing this, IRIS+ focuses on sectors including Real Estate, Agriculture, Health, Employment, Education, Financial Services, and Climate Security. Meanwhile, Gold Standard focuses on enabling initiatives to quantify, certify, and maximize their impacts in specifically climate security and sustainable development sectors. They allow organizations to have their projects be “Gold Standard Certified.” However, based on deep research, it appears there are not many projects that have been certified and they all are very specific and similar. Due to Gold Standard’s vague system structure and lack of transparency, ImpactX is not recommended to use Gold Standard as an influence on its creation of a new platform dedicated to consolidating various frameworks.

Looking at the metrics, IRIS’s metrics are straightforward to access. It is difficult to find any metrics from the Gold Standard website aside from documents that seem to be more of a checklist for projects to become “Gold Standard certified” rather than metrics that can be helpful for an impact. The Gold Standard metrics aren’t yet rolled out for universal use. Overall the spreadsheet is confusing and not user-friendly. The impact tools are still in development. The Gold Standard website shows an Impact Registry of projects sorted by their progress on being Gold Standard certified. Emission credits are given to projects but there are no linked metrics for individual projects which makes Gold Standard not legitimate enough to be considered for Impact X. 

Gold Standard and IRIS+ were both created to help companies and investors maximize their impacts on different areas. Both websites are available to anyone, either individuals or organizations who are looking to learn the different ways in which they can contribute and boost their impact. Gold Standard was created to certify carbon-reducing emission projects that contribute to sustainable development and have the highest levels of environmental integrity. Similarly, IRIS+ was created so that investors and companies could have a common understanding of how to effectively measure and manage their impact to learn how to expand and improve that impact over time. Both websites can certify NGOs that meet certain criteria, this is where differences come into play.

While Gold Standard aims to maximize impact towards climate security and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), IRIS+, on the other hand, focuses on contributing to a wider variety of areas. Gold Standard’s website offers limited metrics; it offers an Impact Registry, which tracks environmental assets like carbon credits as well as the associated sustainable development impacts of the certified interventions. Its ‘metrics’ are hard to understand, especially from the perspective of a newer NGO looking for certification. An investor would likely need to do much more of their own investigating and researching of Gold Standard certified projects before deciding to invest.

Unlike Gold Standard, IRIS+ has very clear metrics for each of its areas of focus. IRIS+ offers a comprehensive, universal library of metrics designed to measure the social, environmental, and financial performance of investments. Its metrics are designed and structured to ensure that they reflect data that is feasible to collect, decision-relevant, and useful for aggregate analysis. These help increase data clarity and comparability and are backed by evidence and based on best practices across the industry. IRIS+ catalog of metrics is arranged in alphabetical order and offers a clear description for each metric. Lastly, it divides specific metrics by industries, making it easy for companies and investors to find them.

In a nutshell, the proposed model is the B-corp model. To achieve this prestigious status and join the community, organizations pursuing B corp certification must undergo a rigorous B Impact Assessment to ensure that they align with the rest of the organizations and the standards. Instead of Impact X trying to categorize projects and organizations and bring investors to them, the organization can be proactive in securing their certification, and there are incentives for them to do so. For the sake of this deliverable, this process will be dubbed “ImpactX Certification.” A large part of becoming “ImpactX Certified” is that the organization will be required to report a certain list of metrics from IRIS+ depending on which field the organization falls under (water usage, clean energy, etc). During each certification process, there will be a list of suggested metrics depending on the category. If a suggested metric does not apply to an organization, they may remove that metric, but the point of having a suggested list is so that the organization that is trying to receive certification can ensure that they have not left out reporting important statistics.