ABSTRACT
Social entrepreneurs often have difficulty coming up with a precise and measurable indicator that can accurately represent the amount of social return generated by their ventures (Saul, 2004; Trelstad, 2008). For years, there has been a massive, unfilled gap in the world of social enterprise: the need for clear, objective, measurable, and cross-comparable metrics on the positive social and environmental returns of projects (Kramer, 2005; Paton, 2003; Poister, 2003; Porter & Kramer, 1999). Increasingly, organizations are feeling pressure from funders to account for their social returns (Clark, Rosenzweig, Long, & Olsen, 2004).
