Giving Compass' Take:

• Sasha Dichter and Tom Adams explain how Lean Data was created to measure impact investments through customer feedback and financial metrics.

• How are you measuring impact? Has your organization found a measurement system that captures all of the information you need? 

• Learn at The Power of Feedback magazine on Giving Compass. 

We all know that understanding customers is at the core of running a successful business. This is especially true for businesses that aim to improve customers’ lives.

Yet too often, especially for those aiming to create social change, we end up relying on well-developed strategies and desk research to understand what should happen for customers, and we don’t regularly gather customer data to understand whether these strategies are playing out in their lives.

How can this be right? Shouldn’t regularly and systematically talking to customers help us with our two most important, intertwined goals: creating successful businesses that create social change?

How could we build a sector that delivers large-scale social impact if we didn’t invest in gathering data directly from customers so they could tell us if their lives are improving?

We developed Lean Data to address these core questions. Our goal has been to find a way to hear directly from customers, even those in the most remote locations, in ways that creates value for them, for the companies that serve them, and for investors.

Read the full article about measuring impact investments by Sasha Dichter and Tom Adams at ImpactAlpha.