“All year round, we develop projects that bring together researchers and field actors, businesses, organizations from the social and solidarity economy, and representatives of public authorities, to reflect on the best ways to measure the impact of initiatives aimed at combating environmental inequalities and social determinism. And once a year, we organize the impact measurement summit,” explains Tony Bernard.
Impact evaluation emerged in the 1970s in American universities and was popularized notably by the work of Esther Duflo, Nobel Prize in Economics. Its arrival in the world of the social and solidarity economy is more recent. However, today, businesses are also recognizing the need to measure their impact, either voluntarily or driven by regulations.
“It allows us to go beyond intuition, to measure better in order to manage our impact and increase it, and also to convey advocacy messages that are backed by proven experiments and factual data,” he specifies.
The IMPACT TANK works on all current social and environmental issues, particularly the question of inequalities. Their work addresses various types of actors, including the state, businesses, and the non-profit sector, which often lacks the means and tools to measure its impact.
This work also aims to guide public policies. “All the work we do includes recommendations for public action on each topic. For example, the first report from IMPACT TANK on scaling social innovations, in which one of our recommendations became a real public program.”
This is the program “La Fonction publique s'engage” launched with La France s'engage and the Interministerial Delegation for Senior State Management, aimed at connecting senior civil servants still in training at INSP with non-profit leaders who are implementing social innovations to better inspire public action.
“We are facing significant challenges. And to meet these challenges, we must strengthen our social cohesion, our unity, our ability to live together, and thus redefine what matters in our social model.”
“The idea is to rationalize the debate based on impact measurement and evaluation. To give time for long-term reflection. At the same time, we advocate for a broader approach to rationalize the debate, to calm it, to rebuild trust between citizens, and between citizens and public authorities, as well as the business world.”
These ideas can be found in the book “What Really Matters: Another Social Model is Possible” written by IMPACT TANK, released in April 2026 by Éditions Le bord de l’eau.
