To use PIE you must define what it is that you are interested in having an impact on. This means that you will need to select places (countries, provinces, states, jurisdictions) that are relevant or interesting for your investment or work. You will also need to define the types of impact on people or nature that you hope your work will have; who or what do you hope to benefit? The variability around defining both place and beneficiaries is what makes each PIE assessment unique. PIE includes a set of beneficiaries from which you can choose spanning conservation, governance, and social objectives. This increases the likelihood that the areas PIE will highlight as optimal will go beyond the biophysical data that underpin the analysis and include social objectives as well. 

As you define your PIE cases, you will work through the optimizations manager and create collections and cases. The collections are essentially the grouping of cases that all have the same geographical focus. Within these collections you can modify your inputs in different cases and visualize how the outcomes and optimizations change based on prioritizing different beneficiaries or actions. 

Before starting PIE have a good idea of the places you are interested in, who or what you'd like your actions to benefit, and an estimated area over which you'd expect your project actions to take place.