By Alexandra Pittman, ImpactMapper CEO

Too often organizations do not know the full extent of the social and environmental changes they are making because critical insights are buried inside different text documents, excel files, and surveys.

Moreover, many software tools that exist to analyze this data focus heavily on quantitative and financial analysis, but do not allow for the meaningful analysis of text data. Yet, the majority of data in the philanthropic, corporate, and impact investment sectors is in a text format.

This is one of the reasons why in 2015, I founded the ImpactMapper company and software-- an easy-to-use tool designed to help organizations track and visualize their funding and the outcomes of their strategies, programs, and portfolios, and share stories of change in a more compelling way.

Our software platform is unique in the impact sector because:

1. It was built by industry experts with a strong and diverse network of donors, nonprofits, and companies committed to human rights, equity, and social and environmental justice to ensure that we can quantify the seemingly unquantifiable.
2. It allows users to transform text, including stories and reports, into aggregatable insights that are aligned with their strategic plan, log frame, or theory of change outcomes and indicators.
3. It supports users in analyzing diverse data types and is a robust mixed-method analysis tool. Users can analyze financial, grant, investment, and project data, reports, interviews, focus groups, surveys, stories, site visits, and oral reports. Plus they can also create beautiful data visualizations in order to communicate outcomes effectively and deliver high-quality impact reports.
4. It stores all project or portfolio-related data supporting analysis and maps and charts where work is happening around the world, including key funding, outcome, and learning trends.
5. It has API connections with Fluxx and Trint to get data in other systems into ImpactMapper seamlessly. We are exploring integrations with Giving Data and Salesforce later this year.
6. We are working with committed funders on the cutting-edge support of AI-enabled tech solutions for social good, such as with the Malala Fund. We are innovating in the area of automated analysis of text data in the philanthropic tech ecosystem through more inclusive and secure data and models.
7. And it has helped some incredible changemakers better track their impact, including Malala Fund, Spotlight Initiative, UN Women, UNFPA, Porticus, Building Equity and Alignment for Environmental Justice, Women's Learning Partnership, Urgent Action Fund-Africa, FRIDA, IKEA, MIT, Women's Fund Fiji, Africa Albinism Network to name a few.

I am proud of this software tool that our team and community of users have created together and that we continue to improve daily with our users' feedback and key donor partnerships.

In case you are wondering how this tool can benefit your organization’s particular needs, please book a meeting with me or feel free to reach out via DM on LinkedIn to continue the conversation.  

If you are a MEL consultant working with organizations that might find this tool valuable in their work, please reach out and consider joining our Ambassador Network.

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