Impact

Our path to social impact

We seek to make a meaningful difference in the lives of millions of people who depend on NGO and government programs for healthcare, education, income support, and other services.

To achieve a positive social impact we:

• Support clients’ use of data and evidence for routine decision-making.
• Inform funding decisions – toward effective initiatives and away from ineffective ones.
• Create and share tools, knowledge, and ideas that expand the use of data and evidence for social good.

How we assess ourselves

To inform our own decision-making, we apply an impact measurement framework for each project.

For each client engagement, we estimate ex-ante the potential for social impact two years after our work is done. We estimate the breadth and depth of the social impact of our client’s work and the contribution we make.

We regularly update those estimates by applying a standardized rubric. We report on the proportion of projects that have achieved high, medium, or low impact across the dimensions described above. We use the impact score to learn which types of projects yield the greatest social impact, so we can better target our future efforts. In addition, we aggregate the number of people we have been able to affect, as a type of “rate of return” on the investments of our funders.

Our limitations

Our impact measurement approach has limitations. First, we cannot apply a research design that rigorously estimates our net impact because we do not know what would have happened had we not worked on a project (the counterfactual). Second, our impact is through the work of our clients, and in some cases, the pay-off occurs beyond the two-year measurement horizon. Third, there may be aspects of our work that are not captured by our framework, including potentially unintended negative consequences. With awareness of these limitations, we are careful to avoid claiming too much and we integrate a broader set of considerations into all our decisions.