Date: 2024-05-15 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00016915
Metrics
Measuring Impact
Acumen Spins Off Its Impact Measurement Method Into A Separate Startup
Peter Burgess
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Date: 2024-05-15 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00016915 | |||||||||
Metrics | |||||||||
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Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | |||||||||
| Acumen Spins Off Its Impact Measurement Method Into A Separate Startup Anne Field Anne Field Contributor Entrepreneurs Sasha Dichter Sasha Dichter ACUMEN A few years ago, Acumen, the pioneering patient capital impact investment firm, developed a unique method for measuring impact called Lean Data. Now, it’s spinning off that approach into a separate for-profit enterprise, 60 Decibels. The method uses mobile technology to interact with low-income customers of impact enterprises, to learn directly from them how they experience the product or service in question. That data is then used as the basis for standard performance benchmarks. Over the past five years, the Lean Data team has gathered social impact data from more than 85,000 customers in 33 countries and worked with more than 150 social enterprises and not-for-profits. It all started in 2014, when Sasha Dichter and Tom Adams were heading up Acumen’s Impact and Innovation effort. Their focus: to rethink how to do impact measurement. Acumen, of course, is an established leader in the area, but they felt they needed something more. “We would do research before an investment to make an impact case, then count the number of widgets sold to measure success,” says Adams, who, with Dichter, is running the new company. “But just because you sell more of something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s having more impact.” With that in mind, they set out to create a way to get better, more useful data and also to put the customer experience at the forefront of their new method. The effort involved experimenting with a variety of approaches but, in the process, they realized something: Enterprises in the Acumen portfolio interacted with their customers all the time—and perhaps they could leverage all those interactions to gather data and build new metrics. Instead of creating top down benchmarks, they would allow customers to describe how the product or service had affected their lives. They started with the call center of one investee, an ambulance company, where they asked customers a set of questions aimed at determining the poverty level of callers. The whole experiment, from coming up with the idea to delivering the data, took one month, considerably less time than they expected. With that, they realized they could effectively use conversations held via mobile phones to gather the data they needed. YOU MAY ALSO LIKE Oracle BRANDVOICE Having Grown By Acquisition, Adventist Health Takes Tough Steps To Become One Organization Workday BRANDVOICE How To Support Employees In Their Roles As Caregivers Civic Nation BRANDVOICE How The Dream I Didn’t Know I Had Came True Ultimately, Dichter and Adams developed surveys for specific sectors that could be used by anyone, producing standard performance benchmarks that could be compared to other enterprises focused on that segment. Companies aimed at financial inclusion, for example, would include questions about, say, financial resilience, while agriculture ventures would focus on income levels, among other things. “With standard performance benchmarks, you can tell if you’re over or underperforming,” says Dichter. For the first two years, Acumen used the approach internally. Then, after investees started sharing their impact data with others, investors began asking whether the firm could do the same thing for them. Eventually, demand got big enough, Acumen realized it would be more productive to offer the services through a spinoff. “We started doing more external than internal work and we realized we could build this into a separate company,” says Dichter. Acumen has a seat on the startup’s five-person board. Acumen isn’t the only impact investor to spin off initiatives into separate companies. In March, Omidyar Network turned its financial inclusion effort into Flourish, a venture firm aimed at backing entrepreneurs forming impact-oriented financial services enterprises. Anne Field Anne Field Contributor I'm an award-winning journalist with a particular interest in for-profit social enterprise, as well as entrepreneurship and small business in general. I've covered those... Read More Print Site Feedback Tips Corrections Reprints & Permissions Terms Privacy ©2019 Forbes Media LLC. All Rights Reserved. AdChoices | |||||||||