Opportunity Fund’s mission is to advance the economic well-being of working people by helping them earn, save, and invest in their future. We’re building a more inclusive financial system, and our Small Business Loan program is one of our primary vehicles to do this work. By providing access to capital and business advising to small businesses that can’t get a traditional bank loan, we are serving a community need and our clients often tell us how grateful they are for the helping hand. While we have plenty of success stories that show our impact through the experiences of our individual clients, that knowledge can only get us so far.

How do we know if our clients’ businesses are actually faring better after they get a loan from us? Opportunity Fund is committed to evaluating our program and measuring its impact on the clients we serve. Our relationship with a borrower doesn’t end when they receive their loan. We want to know how our borrowers are doing one, two, or even three years later. Are clients staying in business? Are they increasing their sales? Are they creating and retaining local jobs? And how can we help them be even more successful?

To answer these questions, we are busy working on our annual Small Business Loan program evaluation. Every summer, a team of dedicated interns calls borrowers from years past. Using the MicroTest Outcomes tool and protocol (developed by the FIELD program at the Aspen Institute), Opportunity Fund interviews clients and asks them questions about their business status, revenues, and household income. Last year, we learned that surveyed borrowers had a business survival rate of over 85%, nearly double the national average. (See more highlights of last year’s results here.)

A lot of nonprofits struggle to find a balance between the need to invest in sound evaluation (which can be costly) and the need to conserve precious financial resources and practice fiscal responsibility and stewardship of donors’ funds.  For us, using the MicroTest Outcomes tool to evaluate our Small Business Loan program is an endeavor worth the investment of time and resources, because the benefits of knowing, documenting, and sharing our impact far outweigh the costs. In addition, MicroTest results help us benchmark our work against the work of other top microlenders in the nation and build a rich track-record of data to map trends over time and across the field.

The results from this evaluation project help us to learn not only how our clients are doing, but how well we are serving their needs. We leverage the results to improve our program and to contribute to the field of microfinance. We know we’ve invested more than $12 million in small businesses throughout the Bay Area over the past fifteen years, and some nonprofits would be satisfied with that number—but it doesn’t really tell us if we’re seeing the change we hope to affect by making these loans in the first place. MicroTest helps us understand if our Small Business lending is actually improving the economic well-being of our clients – and for that, the exhaustive hours our interns spend on the phone talking to borrowers past is worth the neck cramps and strained voices.