Portfolio verification
Know what your portfolio is actually achieving. Independent, field-verified evidence of what each grant is producing, how the money is being used, and what social return it is generating, read from the ground rather than from the grantee's own report.
You have moved money out of the door. The harder question is what came back, not to you, but to the people your grantees were meant to serve. Transitions Lab gives funders an independent, field-verified view of the whole portfolio, built for grantmakers, foundations, and public funders who need to see, honestly, whether the projects they back work.
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Most funders learn about their impact from the people they are funding. Grantees self-report against indicators they helped choose, in narratives written to secure the next round. The result is a portfolio picture that is optimistic by construction, and impossible to compare across grants. Three gaps recur, and they compound each other.
When the organisation being evaluated is also the organisation reporting, the incentive runs one way. Even honest grantees round up. A funder reading only grantee reports is reading a case for continued funding, not an assessment of impact.
Every grantee measures differently, so a portfolio of twenty grants produces twenty incompatible reports. The funder cannot say which grant delivered the most change per pound, because no two grants counted change the same way.
Output counts, people reached, workshops delivered, are easy to collect and tell you almost nothing about whether a life or a system actually changed. The number that matters, the real outcome net of what would have happened anyway, is exactly the number self-reporting is worst at.
The market has answered these gaps mostly with software: dashboards that aggregate whatever grantees type in. A dashboard makes bad data prettier and faster; it does not make it true. The missing ingredient is not another platform. It is independent, field-based verification feeding the platform.
For the wider argument behind this diagnosis, see the insight The Reporting Loop.
The Lab combines its core field research and impact measurement with a dedicated portfolio layer built for grantmakers. It sits on top of the services we already provide, tailored to the funder's question: not "did this one project work?" but "what is my whole portfolio achieving, and where should the next pound go?"
Independent verification, grant by grant. We measure a sample of your grantees ourselves, in the field, using the same discipline we bring to any study: reach, depth, and experience, on a baseline, from the people the grant was meant to serve. The grantee's own report becomes one input among several, checked against primary evidence rather than taken on trust. This is the piece no self-report and no dashboard can supply, and it is the Lab's core advantage.
A common measurement frame across the portfolio. We define a shared outcome frame at the portfolio level, aligned to established standards (OECD-DAC evaluation criteria, a theory of change per grant, common indicators where grants are comparable), so that different grants can finally be read against each other. Where two grants pursue the same outcome, we measure it the same way, and the funder can compare cost per outcome honestly.
Social return, calculated properly. Where a funder wants a monetised figure, we calculate social return on investment (SROI) to the recognised Social Value International standard, and, crucially, we calculate it from verified field evidence rather than the grantee's projections. That means applying the discipline most SROI figures skip: the four adjustments that separate real return from inflated return.
A portfolio platform to see it all. The verified evidence feeds a portfolio dashboard built for the funder: live KPI tracking per grant, use-of-funds against outcomes, benchmarking across the portfolio and against the sector, and board-ready reporting that updates as new field data arrives. The platform is the window; the field verification behind it is what makes what you see trustworthy.
SROI expresses impact as a ratio: every £1 invested produced £X of social value. It is a powerful, decision-ready number, and it is also the most abused figure in the sector, because a ratio built on optimistic self-report and skipped adjustments can say almost anything.
The Lab calculates SROI to the Social Value International standard, which turns a programme into an auditable ratio through a disciplined sequence, and we do not skip the steps that make it defensible.
| Step | What it means | Why funders should insist on it |
|---|---|---|
| Scope & stakeholders | Define precisely what is being measured, and involve the people affected in saying what changed | A ratio with vague scope inflates easily; naming the boundary is what keeps it honest |
| Map outcomes | Trace inputs to outputs to outcomes to impact, per grant | Stops a funder crediting activity (outputs) as if it were change (outcomes) |
| Evidence & value | Gather evidence of each outcome and assign a financial proxy to it | The proxy must trace to a real source; an unsourced proxy is a guess with a decimal point |
| The four adjustments | Subtract deadweight, attribution, displacement, and drop-off | This is where honest SROI separates from impact-washing (see below) |
| Calculate & verify | Compute the ratio, and trace every number back to its evidence | A defensible ratio resolves to its source when a board questions it |
Most inflated SROI figures are inflated because they skip these. The Lab never does.
A forecast SROI published at proposal stage and never revisited is a projection, not evidence. The Lab reads cohort data as it arrives, so the ratio moves from forecast to evaluative and stays current as reality, including drop-off, shows up.
The funder-facing platform brings the portfolio into one view.
What distinguishes it from the grant-management software already on the market is not the dashboard. It is that every figure in it has been checked against primary field evidence by an independent team. The platform is only as trustworthy as the data beneath it, and the data beneath it is ours, gathered from the people the grants were meant to serve.
Grant-management platforms are good at workflow: applications, reviews, awards, reminders. They are not built to gather independent field evidence, and most explicitly rely on grantee self-report. Pure evaluators are rigorous but slow and rarely independent of the grantee relationship.
The Lab occupies the intersection that neither covers: independent, field-based, socio-technically literate measurement, feeding a portfolio platform a funder can actually run a board meeting from.
We are not selling you a dashboard and hoping your grantees fill it in well. We are gathering the evidence ourselves, verifying it against the people it concerns, and giving you a portfolio view you can defend, to your board, to your auditors, and to the public whose money or trust you are stewarding.
For the argument behind this service, see The Reporting Loop. For the method the verification uses, see Field Research and Impact Measurement. To talk about your portfolio, see Contact.
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Send a short note about what you need to know and who it concerns. We will come back with an approach, a timeline, and an honest view of what evidence can and cannot settle.