Target community

Every NPO or Social Enterprise has to answer a basic question before it can measure anything: who, exactly, is this project for?

The workbook's answer is the target community. Every NPO or Social Enterprise has an area of intervention — the place and the people the project is designed to reach. The organisation itself establishes and states what that target community is.

This matters because it is the yardstick for direct impact. Direct impact is the change seen in the intended target group, who are also the project's key stakeholders. Without a clearly stated target community, an assessor has no fixed group against which to measure whether the project actually worked.

The workbook's own words (Chapter 7, section 7.3.1): "Every NPO/SE will have an area of intervention where the program/project/activity is implemented. The target community will be mentioned/established by the NPO/SE."

Its role in direct impact. Direct impacts are the changes seen in the intended target group, who are the programme's key stakeholders. They are material to the SE's performance and link the project back to its stated social intent. Direct impacts appear in the immediate timeframe and cannot be left out of the impact report.

Its role in classification. Once a target community is fixed, an assessor's taxonomic classification (under the Social Impact Assessment Standards) guides which indicators actually capture direct impact on that group, and those indicators feed the project's Impact Score Card.

No numeric threshold defines a target community in the workbook. Its size and boundary are set by each NPO or Social Enterprise's own project design, not by a SEBI rule. What the workbook does fix is the requirement that the target community be stated explicitly, so it can be checked against later.

Illustrative NPO; figures are made up.

Him Jyoti Trust lists a ₹45 lakh maternal-health project on an SSE. Its offer document establishes its target community: pregnant women and new mothers in 18 villages of a single hill block in Uttarakhand, not "women in Uttarakhand" generally, and not a national population.

Because the target community is fixed at 18 named villages, the assessor's direct-impact indicators are drawn only from those villages: institutional delivery rate, maternal deaths, and postnatal check-up coverage, tracked before and after the project.

Two years later, a neighbouring district, never part of the stated target community, independently adopts Him Jyoti's antenatal-checklist method after hearing about it at a state health workshop. That spread, outside the stated target community, is not counted as Him Jyoti's own direct impact. It is closer to a systemic impact, and the two are reported separately.

Chapter 7 (Social Impact Assessment Reporting), section 7.3.1, introduces target community immediately after defining direct impact, as the group direct impact is measured against. Expect a question asking who establishes the target community (the NPO or Social Enterprise itself), or one distinguishing target community from the broader reach of systemic impact.

• The NPO or Social Enterprise itself defines its target community — it is not fixed by SEBI, the exchange or the assessor.
• Target community is the yardstick for direct impact specifically, not for systemic impact, which by definition reaches beyond it.
• Do not confuse target community with target segment — target segment is the specific disclosure item naming who is affected and how, used in ICDR minimum disclosures and the Annual Impact Report; target community is the broader area/population concept from Chapter 7's direct-impact discussion.
• No minimum population size is set. A target community can be one village or several districts — what matters is that it is stated clearly.