Determining Success Criteria for Agricultural Social Start-Ups in Indonesia

In recent years, there has been a growing phenomenon in social start-ups, defined as an organization seeking to achieve social missions through market mechanisms. It is difficult for social start-ups to select the most relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) because it is difficult to find a shared impact language to code, classify, and interpret the impact. Existing global social impact metrics focus only on classifying impact performance indicators and lack critical analysis for prioritizing impact performance indicators. This study aims to determine key impact performance indicators for assessing success in agricultural social start-ups in Indonesia. Based on the IRIS metrics developed by GIIN, there are three main impact themes in agriculture: smallholder agriculture, sustainable agriculture, and food security. The three impact themes are divided into 12 strategic goals, where each strategic goal contains impact performance indicators. The analytical hierarchy process (AHP) was then carried out. Prioritization of impact themes and strategic goals is carried out based on expert judgment. The AHP results showed that smallholder agriculture is the most important impact theme to achieve for social start-ups. Five of the 12 strategic goals with the highest priority were explained as candidates of KPIs: the financial health of farmers, better and stable pricing, social equity and justice, farm profitability, and food availability and diversity. The KPIs developed in this study is anticipated to be utilized by stakeholders involved in the agricultural social start-up ecosystems, including practitioners, impact investors, and policy-makers.