4 Tips to Take Your Impact Measurement to the Next Level

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Mentoring made a difference for George Kamau. George is what you'd call a "serial entrepreneur." Before he joined MicroMentor, George had already started his first business, Errands Guy, running errands for a small fee. Yet George knew that he could do more. George wanted to scale his business and offer logistics support to small- and medium-sized businesses, but he only had the seed of an idea. That's when George found MicroMentor; with the advice of several mentors, he was able to develop the strategy and structure for what would become Mzigo Logistics.

With stories like George's, it's clear that mentoring can make an impact on the lives and communities of the world's up-and-coming entrepreneurs. Proving that impact is a different story. Social progress is a massive web of intersecting impacts—George himself acknowledges the impact of mentoring, but it was by no means the only reason he succeeded. It's hard to isolate MicroMentor's impact when you consider all the factors for George's success, such as his innovative mind, his support system, the business climate, and countless others. So how can we do it for the entire MicroMentor community?

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    George's business, Mzigo Logistics, creates jobs and supports small -and medium-sized businesses in his community in Kenya.

At MicroMentor, we've spent more than a decade honing our impact measurement, so we know that it can be among the most challenging parts of running a social venture. It takes time, resources, and no small amount of skill, but anyone can effectively measure their impact, given the right guidance. Regardless of where your organization is at in proving your impact, these four tips can help you make sure that donors, customers, and beneficiaries alike will know that you make a difference.

1. Know Your Results Chain

The very first step to measuring MicroMentor's impact came by understanding how that impact developed. Entrepreneurs don't grow their revenue and hire more employees the moment they speak with a mentor, nor did George's growth happen overnight. Working with his numerous mentors, George developed his business skills and found crucial social support. George's mentoring success came from a series of well-defined stages of growth—something we call MicroMentor's pathway to impact.

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    MicroMentor's Pathway to Impact

Success in measuring your impact means more than just knowing what that impact is; it means knowing how that impact develops. Nonprofits call this a Results Chain: how an organization’s actions lead to their desired impact. Your results chain can give you a range of outcomes to measure, giving important context for your impact.

MicroMentor gives entrepreneurs around the world access to social capital, helping them to improve key skills, as well as access business development resources and social support. These things lead to MicroMentor's desired impact of economic opportunity, as measured by job creation and revenue growth. By reporting on skill improvement, an increase in access to financial capital, and improved psychological well-being alongside job creation and revenue growth, we can paint a clearer and more compelling picture of MicroMentor's impact.

Identify the steps along your results chain and measure each one. Doing so doesn't just give your impact context and color—it allows you to truly understand your intervention and, potentially, find ways that you can improve it.

2. Start with Qualitative Analysis

Qualitative analysis can be expensive. Interviews and focus groups can take a lot of time and resources, so why would they matter when you have perfectly good quantitative results?

Your quantitative data is only as good as the assumptions that underlie them. Any qualified market researcher will tell you that you should build your surveys on direct consumer insights. The same is true of your analyses: if you only measure the outcomes you expect, then you could be missing a great deal.

Every year, our impact survey includes open questions for entrepreneurs to share their stories, feedback, and concern. This is just one of many ways in which MicroMentor stays in contact with our community and gathers insights on the impact of our program. It's also how we came to understand the important psychological element of mentoring.

Let your beneficiaries tell you the impact your organization is having. You may be surprised to find benefits that you weren't even aware of. Social impact is about people. Beginning your analysis from anywhere but a people-centered perspective is to miss the point entirely.

3. Research Is Your Friend

Social impact is not a new concept. Researchers and academics have been studying the impact of social enterprises and nonprofits for decades. Their research provides an incredible opportunity to build your evaluations on a foundation of scientific evidence. Secondary research can give insight into your intervention, opportunities for improvement, and instill confidence in your results chain.

MicroMentor uses outside research to reinforce our results chain. Research, such as on how psychological well-being and entrepreneurial self-efficacy are related to business growth, have helped us shape both our platform and our evaluations. This research also helps us establish credibility with potential investors; peer-reviewed research backs up our results chain and supplements the results of our internal evaluations.

The world of academic research is broad and can be difficult to manage. Here are a few steps to get you started:

  1. Use Google Scholar to search key terms related to your organization. For MicroMentor, that may include "entrepreneurship," "mentoring," or "business growth."
  2. Read through abstracts and create a list of potentially relevant papers. Practice gleaning the highlights from a paper without reading through every single section.
  3. Reach out to the authors of those papers. To start, if the paper is behind a paywall, the author may be willing to share it with you. More importantly, they may be familiar with other resources, organizations, papers, and authors that could be helpful in your quest for research

4. Communicate with Stories

Providing clear evidence of impact is important, but your numbers are only as useful as they are convincing. Graphs, numbers, and infographics can go a long way to communicate your impact, but just as important is having a human story for people to connect with.

It's no coincidence that MicroMentor's 2021 impact report focuses on stories of real people. Our results are there, produced from rigorous evaluation and hard statistics, but those numbers mean nothing if people don't internalize them. That's why we don't just tell someone that virtual business mentoring makes an entrepreneur 27% more likely to access financial capital. We tell the story of Bipana, a young Nepali entrepreneur who managed to find grant funding with the help of her mentor.

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    Bipana’s organization, The Learning Fortress, brings education to Nepali children without internet access to keep them engaged and interested in learning

Ask yourself: what are the stories that make you proud of what you do? Which do you share with your family and your friends? These are the kinds of stories that you can use to sell your impact. An investor may remember an interesting statistic or a convincing graph, but if you show those numbers alongside a truly moving story it will be much harder to forget.

Growing Organically

Even the most advanced measurement systems have room to improve, so don’t expect to perfect your evaluations overnight. When making improvements to analytics, research, and evaluation systems it’s important to do so incrementally. This will allow you to measure the impact of those changes and make informed decisions as you grow as an organization. Many of the challenges you will face will depend entirely on your industry, your business model, and your business stage, but that doesn’t mean you have to go it alone; you can always find a mentor.

Find the business help you need. Share the knowledge you have.

Join MicroMentor today