Alight, formerly the American Refugee Committee, has been providing essential aid to displaced individuals worldwide since 1979. In 2021, with the appointment of a CEO from a human-centered design background, Alight embarked on a journey to reimagine its impact strategy through a deeply participatory, customer-centered approach.

The Challenge:

The shift in leadership brought a new emphasis on gathering insights directly from beneficiaries, co-creating solutions with them, and continuously refining services to meet their evolving needs. Alight needed a way to demonstrate the social returns of these strategic advancements to its board and set a new benchmark for the sector.

Our Solution:

We began by redefining impact measurement through a lens that would capture the full scope of Alight’s participatory strategy. Our approach focused on the Social Return on Investment (SROI), aiming to quantify and communicate the value generated by engaging beneficiaries directly in service design and feedback processes.

Working with Neol, Nuway, and Fraîche, we analyzed Alight’s foundational belief system, information channels, and operational structure to identify ways that SROI could capture the tangible benefits of their customer-centered initiatives. This led to a tailored framework for measuring impact at three levels:

1. General Metrics: Capturing foundational statistics on reach, resources allocated, and direct outputs, providing a baseline for Alight’s impact.

2. Strategic Performance Indicators (SPIs): Identifying metrics that measure beneficiary engagement, satisfaction, and collaborative outcomes to quantify the social returns of Alight’s co-creation and feedback systems.

3. Operational Metrics: Tracking metrics related to the efficiency and adaptability of service improvements based on field feedback, underscoring the value of responsiveness in Alight’s approach.

Outcome:

These metrics were visualized in an engaging, easy-to-navigate dashboard that showcased Alight’s social return in clear, actionable terms. Alongside, we developed a cultural transformation guide to embed these impact measurements into Alight’s day-to-day practices, ensuring that SROI remained a core part of its operational and strategic decision-making. This comprehensive impact measurement framework positioned Alight not only to report on its results but to continuously evolve and improve its services in alignment with the needs of its beneficiaries.