How our scoring methodology works

1. Analyses & Ratings

Our community researches and writes impact analyses about companies all over the world. Each analysis that is published on the platform is rated by the community according to 2 dimensions: value (how positive/negative the impact is) and materiality (how small/large the impact is).


2. Knowledge Ratio

All raters are not equal: the more a community member has read and rated previously on the same company and/or Sustainable Development Goal, the higher their "Knowledge Ratio" is. That means that we do not have one specific "Knowledge Ratio" per rater. Instead, the ratio is calculated on the spot at the time a rater submits a new rating. A very informed rater can have a weight that is several times higher than a rater rating for the first time. For example, a person’s first-ever rating on “Nestlé and Climate Action” will have significantly less weight than a very informed rater.

3. Decay Factor

Our algorithm also integrates a decay factor that is applied to all ratings received on the platform. Each day that passes, the weight of "old" ratings are slowly decreased so that more recent ratings are always favoured against older ones. This decay factor follows a simple one-year-half-life logarithmic scale, which means that a rating published one year ago is worth half of one published today and a rating published 2 years ago is worth a fourth of a rating published today.

4. Value & Materiality

Once we have applied these calculations, we end-up with a Value score and a Materiality score for each analysis. As a precautionary measure, we do not publish Value scores and Materiality scores for companies with less than 15 ratings, ensuring only robust data is available.

5. Weighted Average

We then calculate a weighted average of all Value scores by all Materiality scores for all analyses attached to a given company. We do the same to calculate the Sustainable Development Goal scores, i.e. we will use a weighted average of all Analyses for that company related to that SDG.

This gives us our final result - live impact scores for hundreds of companies.

This is a high-level summary of our approach to impact scoring. If you would like more information about our methodology please get in touch with our client team (clients@impaakt.com), we can share a full technical document that delivers more depth on our company rating and scoring methodology.