The ISEAL Code of Good Practice for Assessing the Impacts of Social and Environmental Standards (Impacts Code) helps standards systems to better understand the sustainability results of their work, as well as the effectiveness of their programs.

The Impacts Code offers a framework for building a monitoring and evaluation system capable of examining both short-term and long-term outcomes and requires standards systems to publicly report on the results of their evaluations. All standard-setting organisations that are members of the ISEAL Alliance commit to implementing the Impacts Code.

The Impacts Code requires standards systems to develop and implement a monitoring and evaluation plan that includes all the steps required to assess their contributions to social and environmental impact. These steps include identifying the impact they are seeking to achieve, defining strategies, choosing indicators and collecting data, conducting regular analysis and reporting of data as well as additional impact evaluations, and setting up feedback loops to improve their standard’s content and systems over time.