Women’s empowerment programs play a critical role in achieving the United Nations’ (UN’s) sustainable development goal of “Gender Equality”. However, non-profit organizations (NPOs) running women’s empowerment (WE) programs face challenges in monitoring, assessing, and evaluating the social impact (SI) and program performance due to the lack of solid guidelines. This study aims to analyze the impact and outcome evaluation indicators of WE programs by providing a quantitative tool. A multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model is proposed to identify and prioritize the performance indicators by utilizing Fuzzy TOPSIS (FTOPSIS) and Fuzzy AHP (FAHP) in a combined methodology. Results validated the identification and classification of the indicators by their importance and viability. In a qualitative study with NPOs working on WE in Turkey, social impact and outcome evaluation indicators are defined and ranked by criteria set in the proposed combined MCDM framework. The study aims to contribute to the theoretical frameworks and practices on social impact and outcome evaluation of women’s empowerment.

Objective – This study explores the social impact measurement (SIM) methods and the associated challenges from the perspective of women empowerment NGOs in Turkey. A literature review was conducted regarding the social impact measurement of non-profit organizations, social impact tools and frameworks, challenges of the social impact measurement, and business information systems used in social impact and project performance tools. Methodology – After that, a structured interview was designed and implemented to examine the output, outcome, and social impact measurement processes of 11 women’s empowerment NGOs in Turkey. Findings – Coding of the data and thematic analysis was conducted based on that qualitative research, and extremely insightful findings were revealed. The lack of expertise, budget, human resources, and established processes are significant challenges for women empowerment NGOs in Turkey. Also, the results of this empirical study indicated the need for digital tools and platforms for social impact measurement, which may also be a cost-saving tool enabling knowledge transfer and process efficiency for SIM. Novelty –Together with that, the study provided unique findings that may contribute to the literature, which address some of the SIM challenges caused by funder organizations’ budgeting policies and lack of demand for detailed SIM reports. Type of Paper: Empirical JEL Classification: Q19, Q22 Keywords: Social Impact Measurement; Women Empowerment NGOs; Social Entrepreneurship; Social Impact Evaluation; Non-profit Organizations Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Köroğlu, F; Yıldırım, N. (2023). Social Impact & Project Performance Measurement Methods and Challenges in Practice: A Study on Women Empowerment NGOs, J. Bus. Econ. Review, 7(4), 01–14. https://doi.org/10.35609/jber.2023.7.4(1)

This study aims to explore the social impact measurement (SIM) methods and the associated challenges from the perspective of women empowerment NGOs in Turkey. Ebrahim and Rangan (2010) define social impact as "a logic chain of results in which organizational inputs and activities lead to a series of outputs, outcomes and ultimately to a set of societal impacts", which is a function of measuring the degree of project's success on the way to the women's economic empowerment in this case. Available consultancy and outsourced services on these activities are also limited in Turkey, and the existing services and frameworks are generally performed with manual procedures. Hence, these NPOs need methodologic and practical digital tools to efficiently monitor, assess, and measure those projects' outputs, outcomes, and social impact. These monitoring and measurement activities also matter in the companies or organizations who will invest in these projects to assure the outcomes' worthiness. Despite its significance, there is a lack of human and financial resources and technical support, resulting in ineffective measurement. Research conducted by Yalçın and Güner (2016) on the women's empowerment NPOs in Turkey pointed out an urgent improvement needs since NPOS still face challenges in applying the tools developed in the wide-ocean literature of the social impact measurement. In addition to that, the expectations from non-profit organizations to prove their social impact are rising every day. This brings about a need to assure their sponsors about their good acts and results in order to continue receiving funds from both their present and future donors, even though NPOs' perception towards themselves is the exact opposite of competition among each other (Arvidson & Lyon, 2014). However, the need for social impact arises not only from the funders' satisfaction, but it also emerges for their self-evaluation as Arvidson and Lyon agreed (2014). What is more, NPOs' recognition of how their social value and benefits are in the eyes of their stakeholders like the society and other beneficiaries is indispensable (Polonsky, Grau & McDonald, 2016). Keywords: Social Impact Measurement, Women Empowerment Ngos, Social Entrepreneurship

In our era, the issue of analyzing and predicting customer behavior and thoroughly aligning their business strategies and marketing activities for companies increases its inevitability everyday much more than before. In this context, segmenting customers has become the most necessary action for the firms all around the world. This study aims to make customer segmentation using the invoice data of an eCommerce company in Turkey. Accordingly, customer segmentation is carried out by the application of the RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary) model which is one of the most significant models used in customer segmentation to identify valuable customers. More on that, clustering methods are applied on the data retrieved from the RFM model and characteristics of each customer group created are analyzed. For this purpose, the most widely used K-Means and Fuzzy C-Means algorithms in the literature were selected. Followingly, by Silhouette and Dunn Indexes, the best performing algorithm and optimum number of clusters of this eCommerce company located in Turkey are provided as an insight for strategies at the end of the study.