I don't know about you, but my inbox is filling up with impact reports from a variety of different colleague organizations and other nonprofits that I follow. It's fun once a year to check in with these organizations and see the progress that they have made in the past 12 months, especially given how challenging those 12 months were.
You might wonder where Upaya’s impact report is. The truth is, we don't do “an impact report.” That might be surprising given that roughly 10% of our operating budget goes to tracking and analyzing the impact that our portfolio is having in job creation. We don't do an annual report, because we collect and publish data and analysis on a rolling basis all year long. Every quarter, we collect data on the number of jobs created. Throughout the year, we interview the employees of our companies directly to learn about how these jobs are affecting their lives. Instead of publishing one report, we have a few dynamic dashboards that our supporters can track all year long.
At the most fundamental level, we share our approach to creating impact in an impact dashboard on our website. It has three sections that step through our logic of how we support enterprises so that they can create jobs so that families can escape poverty. The data that are shown are updated in real time as we make new investments and survey new job holders.
A snapshot of Upaya’s Impact Dashboard
For the real impact nerds, and we know our community includes a lot of them, we also created a special dashboard that walks through the five elements of impact as defined by the Impact Management Project. While that may sound very wonky, it's actually a very straightforward and useful framework that helps impact investors like us tell our impact story in a very transparent way.
We encourage our supporters to visit these pages throughout the year to see how we're doing. We share the good with the bad. Part of the reason we are so insistent on real time analysis is that we don't want to be surprised at the end of 12 months if the impact we were expecting isn't happening. We want to be able to intervene if necessary or provide support to a company that may not be aware of challenges their jobholders are experiencing.
By the way, I'm certainly not implying that our colleagues are only looking at their impact data once a year. I'm merely saying that, given how much effort and energy goes into our ongoing dashboards, it would be redundant for Upaya to publish another report at the end of the year.
Given how critical impact measurement and management is for Upaya, you can imagine how careful we were to fill the hole in our senior leadership left by our co-founder Sachi Shenoy, who led this work from our founding until October of 2021. After four months of meeting with very impressive and credentialed impact experts, I am delighted to introduce you to Shruti Goel, Upaya’s Director of Impact Measurement and Management. Shruti joined us in January of 2022 from the Palladium Group where she was the Portfolio Lead for the (Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) funded IMPACT programme. Prior to that, she was with Intellecap, one of our colleagues in the impact investing space. She has also worked on projects for Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID. Beyond her technical skills, though, it was clear we had found our director when she asserted passionately in an interview: “All I care about is the impact. We need to know if it's working.”
My thoughts exactly. Welcome Shruti!
