Impact Advisory Services

Make high-stakes funding decisions with predictive ROI, not intuition.

Work with the GitLab Foundation team to apply an ROI approach and maximize impact.

The Challenge: In philanthropy deciding where to invest, measuring effectiveness and building internal capacity often come with familiar obstacles:

• Comparability: Opportunities are difficult to weigh on equal terms.

• Evidence: The quality of evidence and data can be limited — or inconsistent — across programs or projects.

• Projections: The ability to forecast results and understand impact is uncertain.

• Communications: Articulating your social impact to boards, funders or the public is a challenge.

Why GitLab Foundation? The Foundation’s work is grounded on proven results, which include building more than 230 ROI models since 2023, guiding more than $65 million in funding decisions and supporting grantees across the United States, Kenya and Colombia.

We offer ROI Advisory Services that combine strategy, ROI modeling and impact measurement to deliver actionable impact insights.

Our approach is:

• Evidence-based: Every decision grounded in data and measurable outcomes.

• Collaborative: Solutions shaped with your mission in mind.

• Practical: Tools and insights that integrate into everyday work.

• Learning-oriented: Building capacity to refine strategies and strengthen impact over time.

Who we work with: GitLab Foundation works with a range of organizations in the philanthropic spaces each with distinct strategic goals to help them better understand, quantify and act on the impact of their work. We work with organizations that are:

• Philanthropic organizations who are seeking great ROI certainty before committing capital.

• Funders designing or strengthening impact measurement and learning systems.

• Impact investors comparing predicted social ROI across investments and benchmarks

• Donors evaluating the expected social ROI of a specific investment opportunity.

• Non-profits aligning strategy and metrics to a clear North Star outcome.

What We Offer: Our team offers a range of services that will help you better understand the impact of your investments, deliver on your impact goals and refine your approach.

• Pre-Investment ROI Analysis: Estimate potential impact before committing resources, so you can choose with confidence.

• Custom ROI Model Design: Co-create bespoke social impact ROI models tailored to your strategy and theory of change.

• Impact Measurement Systems Building: Help funders define the KPIs for their impact goals and define what meaningful change looks like. Set clear impact metrics, design measurement plans, and build learning and feedback loops that drive continuous improvement.

• Post-Investment ROI Analysis: Assess actual investment social impact results and validate assumptions to support learning and accountability.

• ROI Trainings & Implementation: Equip teams to adopt ROI thinking in practice and embed it across culture.

How we work: Partnering with our team means working with a trusted partner with deep experience in the space and a commitment to transparency and turning insights into action.

• Grounded in Practice: As a Foundation, we apply our learning, tooling and modeling to ourselves.

• Designed to be Nimble: Our work is adaptable across different categories, from direct service to research and policy, infrastructure, impact investing and more.

• Equipped with Actionable Tools: Our customized dashboards and visuals are designed for real-world decision-making.

Ready to Learn More?

We’re committed to working alongside mission-driven organizations to make strategies more straightforward, investments stronger and impact more visible.

Click here to email our team and set up a time to discuss our approach and what could work for you or your organization.