Impact Measurement & Management Consulting
Making your mission measurable – and your impact undeniable.
Helping CDFIs and housing nonprofits measure impact, build trust, and prove what they already know – their work changes lives.
Services:
- Impact framework development
- Data collection and analysis systems
- Outcome measurement and reporting
- Theory of change mapping
- Dashboard creation for impact metrics
Advice for Nonprofits: Eliminate the “Garbage In” Problem
Quality impact measurement starts long before analysis. If you want reliable data, focus on these three fundamentals:
- Incentivize careful collection. Data entry is often treated as administrative burden rather than mission-critical work. When staff understand how their inputs connect to organizational learning and funder relationships – and when that care is recognized – quality follows.
- Listen to your data collectors. The people entering information daily understand where the friction points are – unclear fields, redundant entries, systems that don’t match workflow. Their pain points are your data quality risks.
- Align on definitions before you collect. What does “served” mean? What counts as “completed”? Internal agreement on how you conceptualize and measure mission-critical outcomes prevents inconsistency from becoming embedded in your data.
Who I Work With:
- Nonprofits seeking to demonstrate outcomes
- CDFIs tracking community impact
- Mission-driven organizations needing M&E support
Lean Into Your Strength
Give funders the trends they want – but always contextualize them with the rigor they need. Learn to speak their language, and insist they learn to speak yours.
What Rigor Looks Like
When a funder asks about impact, don’t just tell stories. Ask the harder question: What would it cost *you* to do this lending in-house?
A rigorous response sounds like this:
We lend to small business owners in neighborhoods where average household wealth is one-third that of commercial bank borrowers in our region. These are entrepreneurs many banks have written off – not because they aren’t creditworthy, but because their creditworthiness doesn’t fit a model built for different lives.
To serve them well, we maintain a loan loss reserve 5 percentage points above industry standard. We charge 150 basis points less than competitors. We don’t issue 30-day delinquency notices – because we know a slow month isn’t a moral failing when your customers’ income fluctuates with shift schedules and seasonal work. We structure loans with flexible collateral requirements and limited recourse – because seizing assets from a struggling borrower doesn’t build community wealth, it extracts it.
This means our portfolio management staff spends more time on every loan. That’s not inefficiency. That’s the work.
Our track record: X loan losses over Y years. The unit cost of lending this way is $Z per loan to borrowers at [specific LMI threshold].
But repayment isn’t the only outcome we measure. We track household wealth two years post-loan, business survival rates, whether owners can access conventional credit the next time they need it. The loan is an intervention. The outcome is economic mobility.When we finance affordable housing, we’re not just counting units – we’re creating stability. When LMI households aren’t cycling through moves, doubling up, or spending half their income on rent, they can build savings, invest in education, stay in jobs. We measure what gets built. We also track what those units make possible.
And we pay attention to what happens next door. Disinvestment is contagious – and so is investment. A renovated building, an occupied storefront, a business that stays open changes how a block feels and functions. That’s not soft impact. That’s neighborhood effects applied in practice.
Compare that to a response without rigor:
“This borrower started a business, employs Y people, used our technical assistance and flexible underwriting, and is now thriving.”
The first version demonstrates your value. The second version is a nice story that any lender could tell.
If your organization needs support with impact measurement, evaluation design, or data systems architecture, I’d be happy to explore how I can help. Reach out via the contact page – I’d love to learn about your organization’s work!
