Date: Monday, July 20, 2026
Hi, I’m Ashley Bonilla, PhD, an evaluation consultant at Intention 2 Impact (I2I), a social impact consulting firm known for measuring and communicating impact.
ICYMI, this week,our team is taking over AEA 365 to explore what it means to treat impact as a verb instead of a noun. Today, we’re exploring why one great case study isn’t enough to tell the story of a whole portfolio.
Hopelab Ventures (HLV), an impact investor focused on companies delivering youth mental health solutions for Black, Brown, and Queer young people, came to us with a challenge: their companies were clearly having an impact, but measuring it at the portfolio level felt like comparing apples to oranges. How do you build a shared picture of impact when one company is running FDA clinical trials measuring reductions in suicide attempts, another is embedding SEL curriculum in 1.5 million classrooms, and a third is leveraging the power of AI to train crisis counselors who then serve thousands of people in distress? Each is doing meaningful work. None of them is measuring the same thing.
For years, the HLV team had been telling their impact story through individual case studies, each compelling on its own, but collectively amounting to a laundry list of outputs that couldn’t answer the question that actually mattered: what impact is this portfolio producing as a whole?
So, we got to work on developing a Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL) framework to communicate the impact of the whole portfolio. We co-created different levels of outcomes, starting with short-term company growth. While companies had varied business models, entry points, and products, there were similarities in how they used HLV investment for organizational development and financial stability. Second, we co-created outcome “archetypes” that described mid-term outcomes among young people across areas like access and affordability, equity and cultural competence, and crisis intervention. Lastly, we identified long-term ecosystem outcomes using the Waters of Systems Change framework to provide common language for companies to describe changing market conditions.
We’re now in our second year of implementation. Version one showed us what was possible. For the first time, we could see beyond the numbers. Across the portfolio, companies were contributing to reduced suicide risk, more culturally competent care, school-based care innovations, and early shifts in policy and resource flows. None of that was visible when outputs were the only thing being tracked.
Version two was even sharper. It included better annual report questions; we layered in financial data that better spoke to the relationship between ROI and outcomes, and we took a scaffolded approach to interviews where annual report responses fed directly into our interview prompts.
We’re already folding in what we learned in the first two years to improve implementation in year three because a meaningful and useful framework evolves with the portfolio.
If you find yourself doing a portfolio-level evaluation and the outcomes feel impossible to pin down across companies, you aren’t doing it wrong. You’re taking an honest approach. It’s intentionality about what you’re trying to learn, co-creating with the people who best understand the work, and the willingness to iterate and lean into the messy. Start with what the portfolio is already measuring. Build shared outcome categories from there. Don’t be afraid to go back and revise. The framework that serves your portfolio in year one may not be the one that serves it in year two.
Impact is a verb, even when it’s hard to measure.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.