Improving Data Management to Maximize Social Impact

<p><b>With 78 employees working across five offices on five continents, Vera Solutions is a social enterprise and B Corp that helps for-profit and nonprofit organizations measure and track their impact, and Founder and CEO Zak Kaufman is here to tell us more about the change that they make. </b></p><p><br/></p><p><b>While working in monitoring and evaluation for an organization in South Africa called Grassroot Soccer, Zak and his team were faced with data systems that couldn’t really keep up with the needs of the organization, especially with Grassroot Soccer just being given a huge grant to scale up their operations. To solve this, Zak had an idea, one that was unthought of at the time, and this was to migrate their systems to Salesforce, a CRM system. This turned out to be a brilliant solution as this then solved their data problems and allowed them to collect and analyze their impact data in a more efficient way.</b></p><p><br/></p><p><b>Quickly realizing the significance of what they were doing, Zak and two of his colleagues sat down with Grassroot Soccer’s CEO and COO, and they came to an agreement that they would leave Grassroot Soccer to form Vera Solutions. After a few years, Zak was faced with another major issue: both his co-founders leaving. Thankfully, the company survived it which, in part, Zak attributes to Vera Solutions having a strong “ikigai.”</b></p><p><br/></p><p><b>Zak also talks about the four pillars of good monitoring and evaluation, which they wrote an article about on Salesforce. He also shares his formula for measuring impact data, and speaking of impact, one of the main products or services of Vera Solutions is Amp Impact, which helps clients measure their impact data at the portfolio level and also portfolio data to manage the entire lifecycle of an organization’s projects.</b></p><p><br/></p><p><b>Despite the notion that charities and foundations would be hard to sell their services to with their often limited budget, these organizations understood the value of what Vera Solutions wa