Impact Thesis Blueprint Glossary

Products and services an investee provides that produce social or environmental results.

Data-driven profile of typical users built from their habits, aspirations, and frustrations.

Resultants assigned to an investment based on its share of total capital.

The portion of resultants reasonably credited to an investment after counterfactuals.

Debt instruments offering rates below market to support impact-oriented businesses.

Capital that accepts below-market returns to enable impact-oriented investments.

Investment structure combining capital with different return expectations.

The financial-return range where blended capital opportunities sit on the Opportunity Field.

The step of identifying which businesses can deliver the products that produce target resultants.

Phase of business maturity that shapes what capital and evidence fit.

How widespread a business model is in the target market and geography.

A record of who owns what equity in a company at a point in time.

An impact investment that unlocks otherwise-unavailable market-rate capital into a field.

The step of choosing which group of invested businesses to fund.

Direct input from the community an investment seeks to serve.

The full range of capital types from grants through market-rate equity.

Stakeholders whose actions enable an investment's resultants alongside the invested business.

The capability that makes an invested business uniquely able to deliver the resultants.

The parent category for end customers, payors, and providers in an impact investment.

Profiles of typical customers used to anchor investment decisions in real human needs.

Groups of customers segmented by shared characteristics relevant to the investment.

The sequence of touchpoints a customer moves through with an investee's offering.

The empirical foundation of impact measurement: qualitative and quantitative information evidencing resultants.

Framework classifying resultant data by provenance and friction.

The effort needed to collect data. Not a measure of data quality.

Whether data meets the standards of being standardized, verified, and confidential.

The origin of data and its proximity to the resultant being measured.

Resultants that would have occurred without the investment.

Capital instruments where the investor lends and expects repayment with interest.

The methodology stage where the impact investment opportunity is structured and bounded.

The methodology stage where the underlying problem is articulated and scoped.

Blended structures where impact and financial capital sit in separate tranches.

The methodology stage where the thesis is composed and committed to.

The Modern Portfolio Theory frontier optimizing financial return against financial risk.

The set of portfolios that maximize return for a given level of risk.

The set of portfolios that maximize impact return for a given financial return.

Direct observation or measurement of the phenomenon being claimed.

The individual who ultimately uses or benefits from the product or service.

An analytical lens that centers the experiences of those most affected.

Capital instruments where the investor takes ownership rather than lending.

Incorporating ESG factors into investment analysis without requiring impact intentionality.

Capital prioritizing financial return, with impact as a secondary consideration.

Conventional capital with no impact intent. The baseline against which impact capital is defined.

The legal contracts through which capital is deployed: equity, debt, grants, hybrids.

The methodology stage where projected financial and impact returns are calculated.

To generate measurable social or environmental impact alongside financial return.

The structures and processes through which investment decisions are made and overseen.

Capital deployed without expectation of repayment or financial return.

The full universe of opportunities accessible only through grant capital.

Data requiring significant effort to collect, often through primary research.

Design methodology grounded in the needs and behaviors of the people being served.

The minimum financial return an investor requires before committing capital.

Long-term societal change resulting from outputs and outcomes over time.

The sequence of stages an invested business moves through during the investment term.

Capital deployed with intentional pursuit of measurable social or environmental returns.

The frontier of portfolios optimizing impact return at each level of impact risk.

The specific resultants an impact investment commits to producing.

A rate-of-return measure for impact, parallel to financial IRR.

Capital deployed with intent to produce measurable impact and financial return.

The sequence of stages a fund moves through from formation to wind-down.

A specific investment offering structured to produce defined impact and financial returns.

The two-dimensional space mapping impact investments by financial and impact return.

All impact investments available to a given investor at a given time.

The plan for how a fund or investor will pursue impact and financial returns.

The mathematical expression that computes Impact IRR from projected resultants.

The active process of steering investments toward intended impact through monitoring and adjustment.

The present value of projected impact resultants discounted to today.

The discipline of measuring, reviewing, and improving impact performance over time.

The structured plan for identifying and addressing risks to projected impact.

A structured statement of how capital deployment will produce specific resultants.

The five elements of a complete impact thesis.

The minimum impact return below which an investment is not impact-qualifying.

The range of possible impact outcomes around a projection. Impact's analog to financial risk.

Capital prioritizing impact return, accepting below-market financial return where needed.

Investee actions that increase the impact return on an investment.

The resources an invested business commits to producing outputs.

Blended structures where impact and financial capital share the same risk position.

Governance structures designed to keep investment decisions aligned with stated impact goals.

The investor's explicit commitment to produce impact, not just to avoid harm.

The discount rate that makes the net present value of cash flows zero.

Groups of businesses funded under a shared investment strategy.

The time period over which an investor expects to hold an investment.

The plan governing how an investor selects, structures, and exits investments.

The legal and financial form an investment takes: equity, debt, hybrid, or other.

The argument for why a specific investment will produce expected returns.

The strength of support behind a claim: empirical, model-based, narrative, or scientific consensus.

A linear map from inputs through activities, outputs, outcomes, to impact.

Data already available or easily collected with minimal effort.

The process of estimating the total addressable, serviceable, and obtainable market.

Impact capital projecting returns at or above the market-rate threshold.

Debt instruments with rates at the market level deployed for impact purposes.

Equity instruments at market-rate returns deployed for impact purposes.

Impact investments projected to deliver returns at or above the market-rate threshold.

The financial-return level at which an impact investment competes with conventional capital.

Data requiring moderate effort to collect, sitting between low and high friction.

Specific measurements used to track resultants over time.

Claims supported by extrapolation from established models rather than direct measurement.

Framework for constructing portfolios that maximize return for a given risk level.

Resultants that can be expressed in monetary terms for inclusion in Impact IRR.

The process of expressing a non-monetary resultant in monetary terms.

Claims supported by qualitative description rather than measurement.

The present value of future cash flows discounted at a given rate.

Organizations operating outside government, including nonprofits, foundations, and private companies.

Resultants that resist monetization and are tracked in non-monetary form.

The value of the next-best alternative foregone when capital is deployed.

Behavioral or condition changes that follow outputs. What changed, not what was done.

The sequence linking activities through outputs and outcomes to long-term impact.

Specific, countable measures of what an investee's activities directly produced.

Immediate, countable products of investee activity. Meals served, students enrolled.

Specific frustrations a target customer experiences that an investment seeks to address.

The party who pays for a product or service, distinct from who uses it.

Resultants expressed per individual end customer rather than in aggregate.

Risk assessed across an entire portfolio rather than at the single-investment level.

Data collected directly from the people experiencing the resultant.

The single, scoped articulation of the problem an impact thesis is built around.

What an investee delivers to its target customers to produce resultants.

Foundation investments that count toward the 5% distribution requirement.

The expected financial return on an investment over its term.

The expected impact return on an investment over its term.

The year-by-year impact return projection underlying the Impact IRR calculation.

The structured estimate of future financial and impact returns over the investment term.

The entity that delivers a product or service to the customer.

Existing datasets used as substitutes for direct measurement of the resultant.

Impact opportunities funded by grants or public capital below the BIC threshold.

Impact opportunities blending public and private capital to bridge return gaps.

Information that cannot be expressed numerically. Descriptions, quotes, observations.

Information that can be measured numerically.

The umbrella term for outputs, outcomes, and impact considered together.

The sources of income that sustain an invested business over time.

Debt repaid as a percentage of revenue rather than on a fixed schedule.

The variability of possible outcomes around an expected return.

An investor's capacity and willingness to absorb negative outcomes.

Returns evaluated against the level of risk taken to achieve them.

Claims supported by established agreement across the relevant research community.

Data collected by someone other than the investor, then used in the investment analysis.

The portion of the total market an investee can realistically reach.

The portion of SAM an investee can realistically capture.

The practice of publishing what an investment taught, including failures, for the field.

Investments that screen out harmful sectors but do not require impact intentionality.

A statement showing where investment capital comes from and how it will be deployed.

Profiles of the typical actors involved in or affected by an investment.

All parties with an interest in or effect on an investment's outcomes.

A check confirming that the projected impact exceeds what would happen without investment.

Examining whether projected resultants hold under varied assumptions.

A visualization of the actors, relationships, and flows around a problem.

The specific group of customers an investee seeks to serve.

The structured sequence for projecting impact returns across an investment term.

The time horizon over which an investment's resultants and returns are projected.

Investments concentrated in a specific impact theme such as climate or healthcare.

The causal logic linking what an investment does to the change it produces.

The seven elements of a complete Theory of Change.

The classification of investments within the capital stack used for attribution.

The full revenue opportunity if a product reached every potential customer.

The sum of all capital committed to an investment opportunity.

Investee actions that increase financial return through conventional means.

The sequence of activities that turns inputs into delivered products and services.

Investee actions that increase financial or impact return.

The blended cost of an entity's debt and equity, weighted by share.