Between calls for more standardization in approaches and indicators promising better ways of aggregating and comparing the social impact of organizations, and warnings of too generic measures neglecting the diverse contexts and social purposes of organizations, aca-demia, practice, and policy debate on how to best measure social impact. Recent efforts focus on the development of tools and lists of indicators to measure outcomes, with little work the-orizing relations between activities of organizations and these outcomes. We suggest that de-veloping a mid-range model of social impact helps combining advantages from both extremes. It creates a middle way between full standardization and an “anything goes” approach. We build on insights and original data from a survey among 571 sharing organizations to develop a mid-range model of social impact creation for the sharing economy. The developed impact model reflects theoretical ideas on relationships between central inputs invested in sharing organizations’ activities’, the offerings they make and the effects they have in social, ecologi-cal and economic terms.
