Your Theory of Change Is Lying to You: Is Your Money Actually Having Impact?

Institutional funders invest $150 billion annually in entrepreneurship support. Most evaluate it using metrics — jobs created, revenue growth, capital raised — designed for accountability, not impact. The field can tell you what happened. It cannot tell you whether it worked.
This isn’t only a data problem. When funders mandate metrics disconnected from their goals, program staff redesign their work to satisfy those metrics. A misaligned theory of change doesn’t just produce bad data. It produces bad programs.
This session starts with a provocation: does your theory of change actually hold together? Participants apply a four-step diagnostic to their own context and leave with a framework — and a next step — they can use immediately.