
Empowering Social Enterprises
Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship
Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University is an accelerator with world-class programs and immersive executive mentorship, Miller Center accompanies social entrepreneurs on their journeys to impact — creating innovative and sustainable solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges

Social Impact Accelerator
In 2021, Miller Center partnered with Sopact to systematically build an impact management capacity of 300 social enterprises. The program exclusively focused on how to learn and share social impact evidence.
We have discussed our learnings from the ongoing program. Selected social enterprises will share their journey regarding the need and challenges of Impact Measurement and Management.
Building IMM Capacity
Challenges before Sopact engagement
-
Miller Center
- Data collection primarily focused on outputs
- Manual data aggregation
- Not demonstrating additionality of the mentoring programs
- Minimum role of mentoring on data strategy and impact learning
-
Social Entrepreneurs
- Basic Theory of Change and metrics
- Lack of data collection in most of them
- Lack of focus on key outcomes
- Lack of alignment to frameworks like the IRIS+ and Five Dimensions of Impact
- Focus on qualitative data
Impact journey after engagement with Sopact in Miller Center Mentors + Social Enterprises
- Aggregated portfolio impact with contextual insight
- Additionality of Miller Center's Entrepreneurship program
- Impact and data strategy for all the social enterprises
- Helping all SE to build trust by directly engaging with stakeholders
- Advisory on impact demonstration across the portfolio
- Decision making with continuous impact learning
Improved impact learning maturity
Tools = Mentoring + Learning Management System + One-on-one support + Technology + Webinars hours
Fifteen social enterprises took three months journeys with Miller Center and Sopact mentors. Most of them started at step 1 with the basic Theory of Change.
Miller Center conducted an open-ended survey at the beginning and the end of the pilot to measure how far SEs and mentors came and how much value they gained from the Program. Some of the improvements in 2022 are based on these results.
Accelerating Social Impact
- The entire portfolio of SEs is managed on Sopact's signature platform, Impact Cloud®.
- All the Social Enterprises received three months of IMM training and three years of the IMM platform and support.
- All social enterprises learned how to measure and manage outcome data on the Impact Cloud®.
- No reporting burden with the connected system saves Social Enterprises and Miller Center resources.
- Impactful portfolio ready for funding
- Proof and success of Impact Evidence are on the Miller Center dashboard.

The consulting sessions with sopact are very helpful, we are making a lot of progress with the social entrepreneurs' impact strategy.

The skills and tools gained through the IMM program, thanks to Miller Center and Sopact, will be beneficial in effectively measuring the impact of projects that will be deployed with this fundraising.