"I can focus on training more fund managers cohort and building impactful funds."

Background

Boston Impact Initiative (BII) is a non-profit Impact Investing Fund that is committed to building financial, social, and political power for entrepreneurs of color. BII's mission is to close the racial wealth gap and catalyze power in communities of color in Boston. BII also provides technical assistance and support to entrepreneurs of color.

Challenge

In 2022, BII fully deployed Fund I and launched Fund II with a goal to raise $20 million. BII also hosted and trained 40 fund managers. Being a nonprofit Impact Investing Fund and having a robust mission, BII is accountable to its funders, investors, and the communities it serves. BII spent hours learning form due diligence data, non-financial activities data, and investee feedback using multiple tools. Not having a continuous learning system and data engineer in the team made it difficult to make data driven decisions and maximize impact on the communities they serve. Building transparency and trust is a must for winning confidence among their stakeholders.

Solution

BII harnessed the power of the Sopact platform to meticulously craft an actionable impact strategy with outcomes and metrics aligned with their business objectives. The Sopact team swiftly designed an impact assessment survey, efficiently capturing responses, and built an investor highlights dashboard showcasing data captured from the survey. This data empowered BII to gain critical insights into the efficacy of the entrepreneurs' businesses, particularly in terms of diversity within key sectors, wealth and asset building opportunities for local business owners of color, and the creation of good, fair jobs for local communities of color. BII subsequently leveraged this valuable data to compile their annual impact report.

Results

1. Cohesive impact startegy with metrics that map to the relevant data sources
2. Identified gaps in data captured and a plan to capture additional data
3. Impact strategy linked to the dashboard report, therefore completing the loop from ideation to reporting.
4. Built an investor reporting dashboard with key metrics being tracked real-time.
5. Survey design and dashboard plan for various cohorts. Eg : Emerging fund manager cohort
6. Auto insight to learn from all the qualitative and quantitative data without any technical knowledge in the team.