When We Know Better, We Do Better
Pictured: Hadil Al-Ashwal, Monitoring and Evaluation Consultant at Socialsuite, Kacie Brennell, Impact Lab Director, and Olivia Yazzolino, Impact Lab Coordinator. The three set up a framework to measure the change created through the Impact Lab.
We’re now focused on measuring the change we wish to create, using data to ensure our small business community is taken care of.
Here at Mission Edge, we’re in the business of creating social change through our Impact Lab.
We’ve known, anecdotally, that our clients were experiencing positive outcomes through the Impact Lab. But prior to this year, we didn’t have a framework to measure and quantify the impact we had on their businesses.
That’s why we chose to partner with Socialsuite, a social impact measurement software that helps organizations measure their impact through surveys and other data collection methods. They trained us on how to build an outcome measurement framework and use technology to create new frameworks in the future.
In the Impact Lab, the change we’re trying to make for people of color and low-to-moderate income communities is multi-faceted, and we needed a tool that could capture it all.
Before using Socialsuite, we tracked outputs like the total number of clients served and their demographics and also collected some anecdotal evidence that we were doing a good job. However, we knew we had to take this information one step further to start measuring if change was actually happening.
Now, we’re using Socialsuite to show, in the short-term, how much a client increases their confidence in their finance knowledge and how much their business model strengthens as a result of working with us. In the long-term, we’ll be tracking how long folks stay in business as an indicator of their business health. Socialsuite helps us track these short and long term outcomes so we can improve our service to the community as we go and measure if we are actually achieving what we set out to change in the first place.
We’re hopeful that gathering and sharing this information will also serve as a reminder to our funders that the real work isn’t done when money is donated.
In fact, that’s only the beginning. What really matters is what happens after the donations are put to work, and Socialsuite is a tool that provides us with a meaningful way to measure that. Ideally these insights will help add transparency to the impact of our work. If our partners already knew we have a great reputation in the community, now they can see the data to back it up.
“Now we can objectively measure the impact of our work and adjust accordingly, because change can't wait, and neither can the people who need it most,” says Kacie Brennell, Impact Lab Director at Mission Edge.
We’ve always called ourselves changemakers, and now we have the data to back it. We hope to use the tools we’ve gained to serve as an example to other nonprofits, because when we claim we make an impact, we won’t just tell you how – we’ll show you why.
To see an example of how we’ve quantified our data using Socialsuite, click here!
See how Impact Lab could help you gain financial clarity for your business in 2023
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