The Singleton Foundation for Financial Literacy and Entrepreneurship’s mission is to make financial literacy and entrepreneurship cool and approachable for young people. It has invested in two strategies to accomplish this goal: Through a short-form video content channel called Million Stories and a video game focused on entrepreneurship called Venture Valley. To help the Singleton Foundation evaluate if it was accomplishing its mission, I developed an impact measurement strategy for the Million Stories channel. The strategy was a four-step process that included defining impact, collecting data, analyzing the data, and developing and implementing recommendations based on the analysis. This meant that I helped the team clearly articulate their objectives for the channel and identify the key results that would demonstrate if they had achieved those objectives. To help inform this thinking and understand how other nonprofits and foundations determined their impact goals and measurement processes, I benchmarked the Singleton Foundation against both nonprofits and for-profits and determined that surveys, site, social media analytics, and partner data would be critical data sources for informing the impact assessment. Ultimately, this project was critical to helping the Singleton Foundation better understand if it was achieving its mission and quantify its impact.

In spring 2020, I worked with another MBA student on an independent study for a nonprofit called The Marshall Project, a newsroom covering mass incarceration in the United States. The project focused on growth and measurement of the News Inside product, a print magazine for incarcerated individuals. In closely working with our faculty advisor and business analytics professor Omar Besbes, I learned to first start with “why” and align the organization on impact goals. Then we applied a quantitative lens to measurement to understand if the organization was achieving its impact goals. I took the learnings from this independent study and my takeaways from Business Analytics, a core class, and applied them to my summer internship. This independent study project served as inspiration for what project I pitched to the Singleton Foundation for the summer and helped to credentialize me as someone who had already done a similar project and had expertise in this area.

The remote nature of the summer made it alienating at times, but I felt lucky that the team at the Singleton Foundation went out of their way to make time for my project, to understand my career goals, and share their insights from long and diverse careers in their respective fields. Therefore, while it was challenging to complete my internship from the same room that I had taken my classes from, it was ultimately a great summer and I loved my time with the Singleton Foundation.

I had three key takeaways from my summer experience. First, that no matter the mission of an organization, much of success is contingent on the team you work with. This has underscored the importance of understanding the culture of future teams and how they work together. The second takeaway was about how working at a mission-oriented company brings people together in powerful ways. The team is driving towards creating a larger impact, which breeds a level of commitment to collaborating and ensuring that things get done. And finally, while the for-profit world tends to have a stronger focus on a quantitative, data-driven approach, nonprofits can also benefit from prioritizing data-driven decision-making. While ROI means return on impact in the nonprofit world rather than return on investment, both return on impact and return on investment can be supported by a data-driven approach.