Measuring Philanthropic Impact: Co-Designing Systems to Enhance Learning and Impact
Philanthropic Foundation
For a U.S.-based foundation devoted to improving economic pathways and entrepreneurship for women and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), Frontier built a new approach to measuring impact in target communities, helping governors better understand how they influence local and social dynamics, in addition to more immediate impacts.
When Frontier began their work with this foundation, the foundation had over 1,100 grants and was investing more than $100 million dollars to build wealth for historically excluded communities. However, their reporting processes limited their ability to obtain an aggregated view of their impact across their broad portfolio and to make data-informed decisions. The Foundation leadership was committed to systemic change and hired Frontier Design as their impact partner to help them better define, measure, evaluate, and apply learnings from their grantmaking in targeted communities.
Frontier collaboratively designed an empirical and strategy-aligned approach to measure and better understand the foundation’s impact. We designed the measurement framework for the foundation’s new strategy, developed robust data systems by creating the infrastructure and tools within commercial software, to support monitoring and learning from investments, and co-created meaningful metrics that foundation partners helped shape and could easily apply. We continuously analyzed incoming grantee data and built dashboards and reporting processes to help the foundation and their partners authentically prove and improve impact, communicating it credibly with storytelling and data at every level throughout the foundation and the broader philanthropic community.
By grounding this approach in core principles, we ensured the monitoring and reporting system balanced the need for data to drive adaptation and decision-making with the commitment to avoid overburdening grantees. In practice, this approach helps the foundation, grantees, and communities maximize systemic impact and informs continuous learning within communities, where it matters most.
With a robust data collection process, the foundation has been able to present meaningful data and stories of impact to their board, to identify at-risk grantees who require intervention, and to learn from the success of other grantees. Grantees themselves have expressed deep appreciation for the clarity the foundation provides in their monitoring and reporting requirements. One large grantee shared, “I’m fangirling over the grantee guidebook and the transparency and flexibility embedded in the reporting requirements.” Another grantee shared that “the reporting process is helpful! It allowed us to review how we made an impact in the community.” Rather than simply crafting a tool for accountability, Frontier Design created a thoughtful system that helps the foundation and its partners better understand the results of their hard work and resource commitments.
The strategy-aligned impact framework and measurement system has equipped the foundation to make more strategic investments with organizations capable of delivering - and measuring - impact to advance their aims of mobilizing career pathways and strengthening small businesses.