The Impact Genome Project® creates tools for the social impact sector to coordinate their efforts at scale, ensuring that philanthropic investments are effectively and efficiently leveraged. The IGP does this in part by standardizing the goals of social impact programs, the strategies used, characteristics of the people that benefit from them, and the elements of the context around them. This allows for the generation of performance benchmarks to increase confidence and ROI of grantmaking (learn more at www.impactgenome.org).

Phase 1 of the Financial Health Genome, generously funded by The Lincoln Financial Group, built on the foundation for scaling evidence-based program innovations in the financial health sector. Phase 1 resulted in the following:

  • Standardized taxonomies that describe the outcomes, genes (or program components), beneficiaries (e.g. demographics, characteristics of programs’ target populations), and contexts (e.g., setting, geographic locations, etc.) relevant to Financial Health. These taxonomies will use language that is meaningful to research, practitioner, funder, and policy communities, allowing for communication across the fields
  • A free, publicly accessible evidence-base of research literature, tagged by outcomes, program components, beneficiaries, and contexts, democratizing access to existing knowledge and enabling more expedient and salient literature searches
  • Exploratory meta-analyses to understand which program components are correlated with specific outcomes
  • A web-based tool that allows practitioners to align their programs to the taxonomies, which supports them in articulating their intended outcomes and benchmarking their results to peer organizations

The findings, detailed in the downloadable report, provide the foundation needed to: understand critical gaps in service; provide programs with evidence-based strategies for improvement; set realistic expectations for programs and funders by contextualizing nonprofit impact; and design next-generation tools for creating impact at scale for all Americans in need.