Measuring Impact Isn’t Easy, But We’ve Done It Since Day One: Meet Upaya’s IM Dream Team

Jul 10

Since Upaya’s founding in 2011, impact measurement and management (IM) has been a core function of our organization. Upaya’s mission is to fight extreme poverty from the ground up by building scalable businesses and dignified jobs. To ensure our work has the desired impact, we go beyond simply counting the jobs our partner entrepreneurs create. In addition, we conduct in-depth surveys with jobholders to really understand and analyze how these jobs enable the jobholders’ progress out of extreme poverty.

Sachi Shenoy, Upaya’s Co-Founder and Chief Impact Officer, can still remember when we had successfully collected the first 100 jobholder surveys, back in 2012. We’ve come a long way since then, with more than 1,300 surveys in our database today. While collecting, cleaning, and analyzing the survey data isn’t easy, as Daphne Delaski, Upaya’s Senior Associate, described in our Upaya Fundamentals blog series, it’s crucial for measuring—and furthering—Upaya’s impact. These data points are as integral in shaping our programs today as they were on day one, 10 years ago.

What we learn from our data collection isn’t always rosy. Shrishti Puri, Upaya’s Senior Data Associate recently shared our team's findings when we applied a gender-lens to our impact data. However, remaining transparent in our work and data analysis allows us to continually learn, fine-tune our model, and share insights with the broader industry.

Upaya’s IM efforts have evolved a lot since those early years when the first 100 surveys were collected and analyzed. Today, we work with enumerators in India who have helped us scale our surveying efforts. We also use Tableau to analyze and share our findings in a series of in-depth dashboards available to the public. And more recently, as Rachna Chandrashekhar explained, we’ve adapted our approach to collecting surveys in light of the Covid pandemic.

Today, we also have a dedicated IM team and four team members regularly contributing to our IM efforts! Led by Sachi, the IM team works diligently behind the scenes to collect and interpret our impact data. Throughout the year, we also get to feature them and their work on our blog!

So, in honor of Upaya’s 10th anniversary, and to celebrate how far our IM efforts have come over the years, we are proud to shine a spotlight on the team members who make this work possible today: Sachi, Shrishti, Daphne, and Rachna.

ABOUT UPAYA SOCIAL VENTURES:

Upaya Social Ventures is building a dignified economy by providing investment and support to early-stage businesses creating sustainable livelihoods for people living in the most extreme poverty.

Upaya’s award-winning impact-first model seeks out and supports oft-overlooked companies creating work that is safe, stable, inclusive, and rewarding—generating a transformative impact on families, communities, and economies.

Since its founding in 2011, Upaya’s portfolio companies have created over 44,000 dignified jobs across India. Please visit upayasv.org for more information.