Client Individuals: Receiving Free Products/Services (PI9622)

This metric is intended to capture all unique clients who received products or services provided by the organization for which it did not request payment and for which it does not expect reimbursement. If the organization expects or receives payment from someone other than the client, these client individuals should be reported against Client Individuals: No Direct Payment (PI1807). This metric is intended to measure clients receiving free products/services that are core to the operations of the organization providing them; for example, some healthcare clinics provide free health check-ups.

Organizations should include the number of unique client individuals who received free products or services, regardless of whether or not these same individuals also paid the organization for certain products or services during the reporting period.

This metric is intended to capture the unique number of specific individuals served. Organizations should not use any household multipliers when reporting against this metric. If organizations consider entire households to be the customer/client, they can report against Client Households: Total (PI7954) and its associated submetrics.

Many organizations may not be able to report on the number of clients using direct data. For example, organizations that sell solar lanterns through a series of local network distributors might estimate the number of client individuals reached based on the number of units sold. Organizations should footnote details on how and why these assumptions were made.

For healthcare providers, “client individuals” refers to patients. For housing providers, “client individuals” refers to residents or tenants.

This metric is multi-dimensional with regard to the five dimensions of impact. It may help describe the WHO dimension when the stakeholder group represented by the metric is the stakeholder group targeted by the investment or organization. It may also help measure the HOW MUCH Scale dimension, which helps estimate the number of the targeted stakeholders experiencing the outcome. For more on the alignment of IRIS metrics to the five dimensions of impact, see IRIS+ and the Five Dimensions of Impact (https://iris.thegiin.org/document/iris-and-the-five-dimensions/). No single metric is sufficient to understand an impact; rather, metrics are selected as a set across all dimensions of impact. When possible, the selection of metrics to measure and describe the five dimensions should be based on best practice and evidence.