This will be a challenging year for the entrepreneurial support community. Funding is an increasingly scarce commodity. The current economic climate is difficult and unpredictable for business owners. As a result, organizational capacities are being stretched thin.

As our ecosystems continue to evolve in rapidly-changing conditions, impact tracking is more vital than ever to nonprofits working in entrepreneurial support.

Having a successful impact on your small business community is only part of the equation. To survive and thrive in any economic climate, strong organizations must design and maintain comprehensive impact measurement systems.

Measuring and reporting on ESO impact is not just a set of lifeless numbers on a taupe spreadsheet. It tells the story of real people building real businesses, creating real jobs, transforming real communities, and your systems should empower you to tell the sprawling technicolor story. 

The big question is: what should you be measuring to tell the full story – from the individual to their business, to the program successes, to the broader economic impact?

Keep reading to find a breakdown of the most important metric groupings to measure in order to demonstrate the full footprint of your programs, mentorship, events, and economic development efforts. This is not an exhaustive list, as your specific metrics will depend on funder obligations, leadership decisions, and internal improvement goals.

The Entrepreneur-Centric Impact

Entrepreneurs come to you for help with their business but in order to achieve their milestones, they inevitably develop their own expertise in the process. How are your business support efforts translating into human outcomes?

  • Skill development: What are they capable of doing now that they weren’t before they engaged with your organization? Can they design a well-rounded marketing strategy for their various target segments? Are they able to formulate financial projections without having a nervous breakdown? 
  • Educational attainment: Does your engagement with an entrepreneur enable them to access opportunities or milestones that they weren’t able to access beforehand? For example, did completing your program on financial literacy help them gain the trust of a lending institution? Perhaps your business planning cohort helped them identify a weakness in their outreach strategy and they opted to take more classes focused on email marketing.

Then there are more easily quantifiable metrics such as:

  • Personal income: Are your founders able to simply earn more money as a result of completing your program? Income should also be tracked and measured on a business level but be sure to ask if their take-home has changed as a result of your support.
  • Employment status: If your entrepreneur had a full or part-time job when they began working with your ESO, have they been able to move into working on their business full-time? This is a huge milestone, so make sure you have something in place to track this.

The Business-Centric Outcomes

You are in the business of helping businesses so obviously you have to measure how those businesses perform, expand, and prosper as a result of your engagement. These numbers are fairly straightforward, quantifiable, and what your funders and stakeholders need to see on your yearly impact report. Some basic but vital examples include:

  • Businesses started: Is that ideation-stage business now operational and revenue generating as a result of your program?
  • Revenue generated: How much revenue are they pulling in as a result of your stellar sales and marketing workshop series?
  • Jobs created: After you helped them galvanize their SOPs and onboarding protocol, how many FTEs have they hired?
  • Capital raised: How much funding has the business secured after completing an airtight business plan with your assistance?
  • Survival rates: Once an entrepreneur graduates from your cohort, do they remain in business? Are you offering the ongoing support needed to help them survive the five-year gauntlet?

The Program-Centric Numbers

To measure the success of a program, you have to contextualize the entrepreneur and business metrics within the program's scope. You should also track specific program metrics as a means to: a.) secure ongoing funding for successful programs, or b.) identify areas to adjust and improve for better participant outcomes.

At the very least, you should be measuring:

  • Number of people served: From how many people attended your info session to how many graduated from the program
  • Number of registrants and completed applications: Do you have sufficient interest in your program or workshop? This can help you gauge if you need to adjust your marketing efforts or even if the content is something that does not reflect the needs of your business community.
  • Program completion rates: How many participants are completing the program? Did you start with 12 participants and end up with 6 graduates?
  • Demographic metrics: Are your program participants a reflection of your business ecosystem? Do they satisfy the terms of your funding agreement? Are you reaching underserved communities and providing equitable access?
  • Number of business advising hours provided: Are your participants taking full advantage of assistance outside of their program session?

These metrics paint a very important picture for both the internal team and external stakeholders. They give you the ability to report on the success of a specific program or, if you are measuring and analysing in real time, can afford you the insight to course-correct before less than ideal outcomes materialize.

The Larger Economic Picture

Once you have your program, individual, and business metrics dialed-in, it’s time to zoom out to the bigger picture. None of your outcomes occur in a vacuum, so why should your impact measurements? 

Overall economic impact may be the most difficult set of metrics to track (and prove) but if you are able to dedicate the time and strategic effort to realizing these outcomes, the numbers will shine on your impact and funding reports. 

These heavily coveted metrics may include:

  • Total economic impact generated: The grand revenue sum of all businesses you’ve supported over a certain period of time.
  • Tax revenue created: This is a powerful metric, especially if you are receiving funding from municipal, state, or federal governmental agencies.
  • Total jobs created: Are you truly creating better, more prosperous employment opportunities for your communities?
  • Business density and diversity: Are the businesses you support filling in vacant storefronts or contributing to the economic diversity of your target area?

As mentioned, these measurements do not readily present themselves and require some heavy analytical lifting. If you are interested or in need of this level of social and economic proof, you may have to partner with a local university or hire an economic consulting firm, as it is likely you do not have the bandwidth or resources to do this work in-house.

Attribution: Who is responsible for what?

Tracking these metrics and claiming credit for outcomes is a complex task, especially considering that many results happen beyond the timeline and scope of your direct support. Attributing a business opening its doors shortly after an ideation cohort is simpler than claiming credit for its success five years later, or explaining why it failed two years after your last advising session.

There are so many environmental forces, life events, additional sources of support, and random factors that make perfect attribution impossible. The best you can do is pursue plausible attribution measurements and be able to provide reasonable causal explanations if they come under scrutiny.

Potential ways to solve for the attribution equation include yearly comparison groups with businesses that did not receive support from your organization, longitudinal interviews with program participants over several months or years, or using a social return on investment (SROI) calculation to strengthen your claims.

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It is exhausting simply doing the work to support entrepreneurs and spending your limited bandwidth chasing down metrics is not ideal. Preserve your sanity by building these measurement processes into your programs, advising sessions, workshops, and other engagements with business owners.

Are you trying to measure the financial literacy of an entrepreneur before and after a free workshop series on the topic? A simple way to get this info is by building a pre and post-survey with questions using a likert scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree) to gauge their comfort level with the topics being covered. Make the pre-survey the price of admission for the workshop and have participants complete the post-survey before leaving to ensure that complete data is collected. Start each business advising appointment with a standard set of questions related to important milestones so that you can track their progress between sessions.

There will always be gaps in your measurement processes but as long as you identify the most important metrics ahead of time, build consistent tracking systems, iterate, and improve, it will go a long way towards ensuring that you have the data to improve your impact and stay measured to stay funded.