Learning for Action Fund
Nonprofit organizations often struggle to fund impact measurement activities, formally gather feedback from clients, or determine how best to evaluate their programs. They are often overburdened by requests to collect data, but are rarely provided flexible financial resources by funders to do so in ways that benefit their goals.
The GitLab Foundation launched the Learning for Action Fund in June 2024 to alleviate these problems and increase our grantees’ capacity to deepen their impact measurement, learning, and feedback work. This aligns with our philosophy that greater investments in evidence-building and feedback activities lead to more effective programs. Ultimately, our grantee’s clients directly benefit from improved services, increasing their opportunities for income growth, living wage jobs, and financial stability.
Rather than focus on funding expensive, lengthy experimental research, the fund prioritizes quick feedback loops, fast learning tools, and learning that leads to strategic action by nonprofit leadership. Projects may take the form of qualitative feedback studies, end-user impact studies, participant needs assessments, client outcome studies, lean A/B experimentation, data collection infrastructure improvements, and others.
Grantee Highlight
“Makaia is aligned in our focus to measure, learn and innovate. This iterative approach is what we believe we should be doing in all of our projects. We think co-designing user feedback to create solutions is a direction we should take in order to go deep on what our participants need. The Learning for Action Fund would allow organizations like ours to start measuring our theory of change and building the evidence to better serve our communities."
Catalina Escobar, Co-founder, Makaia
The GitLab Foundation improves people’s lifetime earnings through access to opportunities. We estimate and track the impact of every investment we make and focus on our 100x North Star ROI. We continuously measure our expected impact. View our interactive dashboard for detailed data and updates.
We invite you to join our inaugural 2024 Learning for Action Funder Coalition by co-investing with us to create more effective programs that catalyze living wage jobs now and into the future!
For more info, contact Eric Talbert eric@gitlabfoundation.org.
