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Sasha Dichter of 60 Decibels talks about centering customer voice to uncover business insights and understand impact outcomes
“We quite consciously made the choice when we started this within Acumen that we were the Lean Data Team – we weren’t the Impact Measurement Team. Instead of showing up and saying ‘we’re gonna figure out if you’re doing what you said you would from an impact perspective,’ we said, ‘can we help you understand your customers better?’”
“It needed to be easier, faster, more dynamic, and more value-add to everybody involved to understand impact. It just doesn’t make any sense – people are committing decades of their lives to trying to make a change in the world and the act of figuring out whether or not that change is happening is an exceptional activity.”
– Sasha Dichter, Co-Founder of 60 Decibels
Episode 53 of Money + Meaning features Sasha Dichter, the Co-Founder of 60 Decibels – an end to end impact measurement company that spun out of Acumen in 2019. At 60 Decibels they are trying to solve a number of lingering challenges around impact measurement and management, primarily the fact that too often the only data that social entrepreneurs and investors have are outputs – such as number of customers served – and have to use this as a proxy for much more valuable data about outcomes and impact. To solve this challenge, 60 Decibels speaks directly to the end customers or beneficiaries themselves, returning high quality data that allows organizations to make better informed decisions for growing their businesses and maximizing impact.
Previously Sasha served as the Chief Innovation Officer for Acumen, where he led the organization’s impact measurement practice and launched the Lean Data initiative that eventually spun out to become 60 Decibels. The conversation covers the state of impact measurement and management, how 60 Decibels data has been used to amplify impact, and the recent launch of their COVID-19 dashboard, an effort to track the effect of the pandemic on low income people around the world.
Featured Voices
Co-Founder
60 Decibels
Host
Additional Resources
- 60 Decibels COVID Dashboard
- Impact on Brazilian gig economy workers
- Impact on Kenyan farmers
- Why Off-Grid Energy Matters: A customer-led view of the off-grid energy sector’s impact
- Subscribe to 60 Decibels monthly newsletter The Volume
- More from 60 Decibels on Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn
About Money + Meaning
Money + Meaning is the official podcast of SOCAP. The series aims to expand the conversation around impact investing and strategies to finance and support social change while stimulating innovative and valuable new partnerships across sectors.
