From Data Overload to Impact Insight: How Sopact Transforms Metrics into Meaningful Action
68% of business data goes unused according to IDC. You don’t need more data. You need the right data.
That’s what Unmesh Sheth at Sopact is on a mission to solve.
Most impact orgs gather data in a piecemeal fashion but never connect the dots. Without continuous learning from the data you already collect, you are destined to stay stuck where you are at.
The problem with most impact reporting tools – they are all about proving you made an impact. They are inherently backwards looking. SOPACT is all about improving your process so your impact tomorrow is greater than it is today.
It’s a SaaS plus advisory solution with special application for skills building organizations.
Podcast Transcript
Jacob: [00:00:00] Welcome to Impact Stories. I’m here with Unmesh and please introduce yourself.
Unmesh: Hi, I’m Unmesh. Thank you, Jacob, for a wonderful platform for telling the story. I’m a founder of SOPACT. SOPACT is a nine-year-old social enterprise. We’re continuously educating people on the use of social impact measurements.
I actually come from a technology background, in the space called software integration, a multi-billion dollar industry. And it’s a company called Tibco Software, which really connects one system to other systems, and thousands of systems for that matter. I enjoyed my life and first career in technology, but coming from India, social inequality issues, women empowerment issues, environment were core to my upbringing, so I always wanted to be in a space where I could make a difference. And so I left that career in 2010. SOPACT is my passion and it’s a second part of a journey and it’s evolving by itself every day.
Jacob: Tell me about how SOPACT makes a difference in the world. What’s the good you’re trying to make?
Unmesh: When I left my corporate career, I went to India, in one of the most resource-constrained environments, [00:01:00] a place called Sewa Rural in Gujarat, the state that I come from. And they have been an amazing organization focusing on healthcare, for tribal areas. So you can imagine, the type of research challenges from data to water to road, all of them.
One thing that really struck me was they had a doctor, Dr. She, from JNU John Hopkins, and one of the projects he was working on, which is connecting the health workers, which is the ASHA workers. One of the challenges was mother and child mortality issues. The health workers would go door to door, village to village, collect the data on a piece of paper, and come to the hospital after a month, somebody would upload the data.
But oftentimes, there’s a lot of disconnectedness especially when it comes to data. We realize that connecting the data faster in real-time is very important.
Secondly, also realize that feedback from whoever you’re working with, in this case, it was Asha workers, is very important because, without their feedback, you cannot improve the service. So, in [00:02:00] this case, by introducing mobile applications and getting the feedback continuously on a continuous basis, they were able to optimize the process so that they reduced the mother and child mortality issues from 7% to 5%, which is a substantial improvement in countries like India. The entire state of Gujarat took notice and then they implemented the process.
So this is the power of data, the power of the feedback that I saw. And I said this is the thing that we got to work on. And it’s a journey that we are continuously working on since then.
Jacob: What does an ideal client for SOPACT look like?
Unmesh: Most of the clients we have are international to US-based clients, but many of them come with three main connectors. One is that they have data sitting in many different systems, many CRM systems, learning management systems, or even some of the transcripts, structured and unstructured data.
The second characteristic is that those data obviously tend to be a bit more on the operational side of it. So if it’s a learning management system, it’s how much time people have been spending in a classroom and how [00:03:00] many classes they pass in training. So that’s pretty much structured data.
But oftentimes, the real story is to combine, the feedback that you collect from the stakeholders, and feedback can be in the form of two aspects. One is qualitative and quantitative. So yes or no, 1, 2, 3, 4 questions or longitudinal in nature, means pre and post.
So, essentially by combining qualitative, quantitative, and pre and post-aspects, you can get a much deeper understanding of what employers want, what stakeholders’ ambitions are, are they gaining confidence or not. And then obviously you still have to combine some of the operational data coming from learning management systems in CRM.
So, you have clients that really have decent infrastructure for the data, but they are not able to aggregate them and provide 360-degree views. And that’s where SOPACT comes in and helps them. provide a complete program reporting and aggregation and also storytelling of the data.
Jacob: Can you give me a good case study of a customer interaction where you helped implement that and saw some [00:04:00] positive results?
Unmesh: So we have quite a few of them documented on the website. SOPACT.com, but one of them is Talent Beyond Boundaries. This organization has been an amazing organization with operations in eight different countries and wants to grow in 12.
So the main theory changes to having migrants from let’s say Libya, Syria, war-torn areas, who have no hope of using their skills in their countries moving to countries where the skills really matter most countries like Australia, the UK. Canada. They migrate them, then they find a matching job based on their profile.
Now, one thing that they have done is that they have data sitting in multiple systems. Salesforce being one of them. They have a global catalog where all the jobs are requisitioned so that people can go and search and apply for those things. The data that they collect from feedback from partners and the candidates. But one of the challenges you see most organizations is that they spend a lot of time putting data in some CRM system and because they don’t have enough capacity to download It, [00:05:00] they create a pivot table and build the thing, but ultimately the dashboards are pretty stale and static. And their goal was to really use two things. One is to continuously learn and share with the partners how the impact is growing, and how they can use the data to grow their partner ecosystem.
And secondly, obviously fundraising. They were a very transparent organization and they made a very live dashboard where they went live within three months of working with the SOPACT it’s an amazing way to raise funds as well as continuously learn from their program success and the feedback from the stakeholders.
Jacob: What’s at stake with all of these impact organizations that are sitting on piles of data? What’s the risk of them not doing something about it?
Unmesh: Fundamentally, most organizations don’t know where to start with respect to impact and data. Oftentimes, they have even forgotten that impact is their primary tool and they’re not using it altogether.
You see a large amount of nonprofits, they spend an inordinate amount of money, having five, six, seven [00:06:00] donation management tools internally. Rather than start doing impact, they’re focusing more on the fundraising part of it, not realizing the biggest tool they have is an impact.
Nonprofits philanthropic organizations, or even impact coordination don’t have this kind of skill set internally. They may have Salesforce, for example, how to power BI, but they may not be able to keep and motivate the workforce for a long period of time. To truly put all the data and story together, you need somebody who has an understanding of what impact is.
I work with amazing organizations like Enable in India and they have purposefully built this process from day one. Because they have data that they have shared the knowledge to so many organizations now, McKenzie Scott and Melinda Gates say, write a check.
So that’s the thing, I hope that the culture of the nonprofit changes where they see impact and data as a goal. But for some reason, nonprofit sectors simply just don’t invest enough properly. And that’s why they’re not moving fast enough.
Jacob: What are the most common mistakes you tend to [00:07:00] see impact organizations making when it comes to their data?
Unmesh: They make it more complicated than necessary. Somehow there’s a tendency to be over-reliant on some of the consultants in the space that consultants who generally don’t have a whole lot of deeper knowledge in data and technology per se. They may be able to articulate your theory of change, but they won’t be able to tell where the data is going to come from and how to aggregate it all together.
So they need to start relying on the people who really have a good data affinity. Work with partners like SOPACT who have deeper knowledge and success footprint, who can really manage the whole services for them until they start growing they should start building their own capacity as well.
What happens is that they end up getting a fund grant for one, after six months, they come and say, okay, now what data do I need to do that? So they buy a survey and everything is on a piecemeal basis. And as a result, they’re not able to put all the dots together. And if you talk to the same organization six years later, even if they’re a well-funded organization, they are still struggling in the same place they were [00:08:00] six years ago. Partly because you need a visionary who can at least execute this aspect. You have to find the right partners to essentially grow this right footprint. If they do that it’s quite easier than most people think it is, but people really make it more complicated.
Jacob: How does SOPACT stand out from the crowd? What is it about SOPACT that your customers have chosen you over the sea of options that are out there?
Unmesh: It’s a combination of technology platform and advisory. We realized that software is a brainchild, but we also realized that advisory is even more important in this space. We treat every organization as unique. We don’t believe that the cookie-cutter approach works in the area of the impact. So it’s really a partnership-based approach where we continue to grow week by week basis is continuously an interactive process.
We realized that most people are investor-centric, their job was to raise more funds and new capital. And so they were not interested in creating real impact. They were interested in just getting the metrics out of the [00:09:00] organizations. But the organization may not even have the data that matches that particular metrics altogether.
So oftentimes what we see is that many organizations that work with SOPACT are coming from skill development organizations.
Our advice is ultimately keep it simple. Do it in such a way that differentiates your impact than any other. Like it or not, every philanthropic organization, let’s say I’m working on STEM organizations in Los Angeles, there are 10 other organizations doing exactly the same thing. So how are you differentiating yourself? Are you differentiating based on how many people I graduated? How many people got grade A? Or how many young and Latino women who did not have potential interest in STEM got a lot of confidence and found a job?
To me, that’s what every organization should be doing, is to find the right storytelling based on the right outcome that matters most to them and that’s tell the story based on that. And to tell the story, it’s not just telling the story, but actually backed up by the data by collecting right data, not collecting lots of data, collect [00:10:00] the right data and effective data. Typically we call it a mixed model approach where qualitative and quantitative data. There’s still a very small percentage of people who are doing this. There’s a long way to go. We are just scratching the surface.
Jacob: What are you most looking for right now?
Unmesh: We’re looking to partner with any skill-building organizations who believe that telling impact and story is critical and we are the best partner for that because we understand impact very well. Skill development requires you to learn the data in a more unique way which can help tell the story. So, come join us whether you have a learning management system, coaching system, CRM, come talk to us and we’ll really sit down together and come up with the solution that can really be complementary to whatever data systems that you may have.
Jacob: If someone was just interested in learning how to better manage their data or measure the right things, are there resources you could point them to?
Unmesh: Absolutely. So, SOPACT is one of the top leaders in this space. If you go to SOPACT.com [00:11:00] website or even YouTube channel, we have more than 10, 000 subscribers. You will find days and days worth of learning on SOPACT YouTube channel. You will find amazing insights and some of the guides like actionable impact management on the website. So there’s a lot of content out there. It all depends on what you’re looking for. And also university.sopact.com is also another good resource.
Jacob: What hope can you give to somebody who’s maybe feeling overwhelmed about this?
Unmesh: I’m glad you asked that question because we believe that people make it more complicated than necessary. What is important is to understand, what your core differentiation matrix is, and come and talk to us. Ultimately, it all boils down to asking very good, effective questions. We are in the age of AI, so you can learn a lot more just by simply asking a few more questions. You’ll be amazed how a platform like SOPACT can be quite affordable as well as really give you more insights in a much powerful way.
I would say one of the biggest failures that I see in the sector is that people go and spend so much time building frameworks which are not practical enough. So [00:12:00] stop doing those framework-building businesses and focus on the right type of data collection process and analysis tool that can give you faster and continuous insights altogether.
Jacob: Well, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and your insights and I wish you all the success with helping to bring more simplicity to the data so that it can be more actionable and we can actually drive more impact in the world. Because of it.
Unmesh: Thank you so much, Jacob, for your time. And again, we are all learning and learning from each other. So we’ll be in touch.
Jacob: Awesome. Thank you so much.
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