GitLab Foundation’s Impact Advisory work helps philanthropic organizations, donors, and mission-aligned partners better understand, quantify, and act on the impact of their work. Whether you’re deciding where to invest, measuring the effectiveness of past work, or building internal capacity to make evidence-based decisions, we can help you embed return-on-investment (ROI) thinking into your pursuit of impact.
Our approach is grounded in how we make investment decisions at GitLab Foundation. Since 2023, we have built more than 300 ROI models to inform more than $65 million in funding decisions across the United States, Kenya, and Colombia. As a funder ourselves, we bring experience integrating ROI into our own due diligence processes and using real ROI results to shape our grantmaking strategy at large.
Our work is:
We take a rigorous but reasonable approach, balancing the best available evidence with the timeliness and relevance needed for real-world decisions. As cross-sector generalists who specialize in the science of ROI itself, our work spans diverse outcomes and cause areas — from economic mobility to health to housing. We focus on what works best in your organization’s unique context and share transparently every step of the way.
Before committing funding or launching a new initiative, we help you estimate its potential impact and ROI. This investment-level analysis helps you make stronger, more confident decisions by comparing the expected ROI of different options and providing independent, third-party due diligence on the underlying assumptions.
We conduct retrospective analysis to assess the actual impact and ROI of past investments based on reported results from grantees/investees. This work supports learning, accountability, and clearer communication with boards, funders, and the public.
We help you track ROI performance and trends across your portfolio in a custom, interactive dashboard tailored to your audience — including insights from benchmarking and predicted-vs-actual analysis where available.
We help you understand what a ‘good’ ROI result is by benchmarking against the ROI performance of relevant programs, contexts, or peers. This analysis helps you contextualize and communicate your ROI results and set appropriate performance targets.
We help your team align on a shared ROI methodology that can be applied consistently across programs, investments, and strategic initiatives. Together, we define your headline outcome metrics, establish your approach to attribution, set boundaries around what is included in the analysis, and determine how to handle risk and uncertainty — all rolled into a handbook and ROI modeling template. We also work with teams to establish a sustainable operating model, from modeling workflows to methodology governance. For teams ready to upgrade from manual processes, we co-create custom digital tools.