Dollars in Pockets: A New Way to Measure What Matters

By NextLadder Ventures and GitLab Foundation

GitLab Foundation is proud to partner with NextLadder Ventures on Dollars In Pockets, a new, comprehensive metric NextLadder Ventures will use to ensure its mission of doing the most good, for the most people as quickly as possible. The below, originally published on NextLadder Ventures website, explains the thought process behind the metric.

All of us who deploy capital to unlock economic opportunity for those in need share the same urgent mission: We want to do the most good, for the most people, as quickly as possible.

To follow through on that commitment, though, we need a reliable way to figure out where our dollars should go.

More navigation technology (NavTech) solutions are coming online, with the power to equip more families with personalized guidance through life’s most challenging moments. Imagine a legal tool that spares users thousands in fees, a benefits app that reclaims hours and unlocks income, or a career platform that replaces months of lost wages. And that means there are more opportunities than ever to fund promising solutions that can make a real impact on people’s lives today.

The challenge? Each technological intervention changes lives through different pathways. But no single metric — not scale or reach, not venture returns, not traditional philanthropic reporting, and not even earnings — captures a full picture, nor converts cleanly between them.

This persistent gap between mission and measurement is why our field needs a stronger method for assessing impact. That’s why NextLadder Ventures and GitLab Foundation partnered to develop Dollars in Pockets.

Dollars in Pockets is a comprehensive metric that considers every dollar that a technological intervention saves or brings into someone’s life. It considers everything from wages gained to fees avoided to time saved to benefits accessed to savings built. As a result, it offers a better measure of total impact — and it can serve as the common denominator in the economic mobility space, allowing funders to compare opportunities across domains.

NextLadder is a new kind of fund that blends philanthropic and venture capital, pioneering the NavTech space by investing in promising tools that guide people through high-stakes financial challenges and toward more prosperous futures. GitLab Foundation, which was founded in 2022, has built the “rigorous but reasonable” return on investment (ROI) methodology behind the metric, which it has now applied across more than 300 pre-investment impact models and 200 grants, with 65 early grantees reporting results and two-thirds meeting its internal return targets.

Our organizations are united by our conviction that our capital should make the most tangible, immediate impact possible by putting dollars where they belong: In the pockets of the families that need them. And with Dollars in Pockets, we can hold ourselves accountable to that mission.

Capturing More Than Earnings

By deploying artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help people clear their eligible criminal records, Rasa Legal offers many paths to cost savings that might get missed in a traditional wage-gain analysis. Their tool immediately saves users thousands of dollars in legal fees. Then, by allowing someone to pass a background check, a cleared record not only helps in finding employment or moving from an entry-level job to a career, but also opens the door to more stable and even more affordable rent in an apartment in a safer neighborhood. These benefits add up to thousands of dollars over a person’s lifetime, and research shows they also impact the future financial outcomes of a justice-impacted parent’s children.

NavTech like Rasa Legal creates value in people’s lives that traditional metrics weren’t designed to measure. Venture returns only measure what an investor gets back. Philanthropic reporting typically shows how many people were reached. Neither of these options offers the full story of ROI, nor do they offer a common way to weigh one program's results against another's.

Earnings-based ROI models are a better measurement standard, and they are the foundation on which Dollars in Pockets was built. Dollars in Pockets takes that earnings frame further by capturing a more holistic view of the financial impact on people directly served - money saved, earned, received, and costs avoided - set against what it cost to build the intervention. That way, investors can better understand what their dollars are doing, and maximize how their next dollar is spent.

Global health solved a version of this problem years ago.

Health systems fund many different interventions — vaccines, surgeries, and mental health care, for example — out of the same budget. So they developed the disability-adjusted life year, or DALY, to translate interventions into a reasonably comparable single unit: How much healthy life a dollar buys.

Dollars in Pockets works the same way. A dollar of legal fees avoided, a dollar of wages earned, and a dollar of benefits accessed are different financial events. When they are converted into the same comprehensive unit — a real dollar in someone’s pocket — they become comparable. And so do the technologies that produce them.

As with any number, Dollars in Pockets doesn’t measure everything. Empowerment and dignity are also important to families climbing the economic ladder. As a starting point for holding ourselves accountable, however, it gets us closer than anything else the field has.

The Ratio That Matters

A raw total of Dollars in Pockets doesn’t tell the full story. What matters is how that total compares to what it costs to produce. That is why we calculate ROI ratios that answer the question: For every dollar we put in, how many Dollars in Pockets does a solution generate?

To determine what ratio to aim for, we benchmark against direct cash transfers. We know direct cash can work well. A dollar given is a dollar received, and it's an important benchmark for understanding whether more complex solutions are worth investing in. Giving people cash is, in some ways, the most straightforward program model possible. Our work should always strive to exceed that. Technology, when it is designed well, can compound a dollar many times over. Think about a cleared record unlocking a better job. A better job unlocking stable housing. And stable housing unlocking the ability to save.

That’s why NextLadder is setting our target ROI at ten dollars in pockets for every one dollar we invest — an order of magnitude more impactful than handing out cash in many places where that has been tested in the U.S. That’s a high bar, and we chose it deliberately. Early estimates on prospective investments often look even more favorable, then come down as evaluation gets more precise and the complexities of scale emerge. So the $10:$1 target gives us a reasonable margin for uncertainty when making and evaluating our investment decisions.

Every investor can set their own threshold. Ultimately, what matters most is integrity, consistency, and rigor in how the numbers are calculated — and how we use them to guide our decisions.

How We Use It

Before NextLadder funds a company, we model its likely Dollars in Pockets return. Then we discount for uncertainty and the time value of money, mark down optimistic projections, and weight every assumption by the strength of the evidence behind it.

Take our earlier example, Rasa Legal. We assessed its impact across three pathways: Legal fees avoided, wage gains that follow a cleared record, and savings from reduced housing instability — drawing on Rasa’s own data and the best outside research to determine how often all three benefits actually occur. Next, to calculate impact, we compare the outcome of the intervention to thoroughly researched counterfactual scenarios — in other words, we count only the difference between what that person’s financial life would have looked like without the tool. Finally, we sum the impact figures from the three pathways, divide by the investment required, and that’s the return.

That said, while ROI features heavily in NLV and GitLab Foundation’s investing and grantmaking, it is just one of many inputs in the decision-making process. We also evaluate the strength of the team, strategic alignment, organizational effectiveness, execution and evidence risk, and expert opinion.

Just as important: After we invest, we validate. For example, NextLadder works with Opportunity Insights to test real-world impact using rigorous independent methods. GitLab Foundation provides resources for its grantees to conduct their own measurement and evaluation work, including direct feedback from the people being served. As better data comes in, we sharpen the models for the next decision.nbsp;

For those who want the nitty-gritty — the full formulas, the discounting, the validation design — well be publishing our complete methodology.

But the accountability is the point. Its how we make sure were delivering real impact for real people.

What We Still Cant Measure

The people NavTech serves don’t just want their dollars counted correctly. They want a real shot at building a life on their own terms.

At NextLadder, we believe that economic mobility has three dimensions: Economic success, empowerment, and dignity. Dollars in Pockets addresses the first. The other two are harder to quantify, but no less important to identifying the full ROI of our capital. They encompass things like expanded choice, a restored sense of control, and ownership over navigating a crisis on your own terms.

We’re still building the yardsticks for empowerment and dignity. And when we have something worth sharing, we’ll share it with the field.

An Invitation

Every mature field develops a simple shared language for measuring success. Economic mobility deserves one, too. And Dollars in Pockets is what our field has been missing.

Dollars in Pockets builds on important work by thought leaders like Robin Hood Foundation, Bridgespan, and TPG’s Y Analytics, among many others. And in partnership with Anthropic, we're also developing AI-native tools to make adopting this measure easy.

Still, Dollars in Pockets will only be as useful as the number of funders that deploy it. So we’re inviting funders, builders, and evaluators in this space to adopt this new method of measurement. Apply it to your own work, and tell us where it breaks. Let’s figure it out together — so we can truly put our money where our mouth is.

Interested in building, funding, or evaluating navigation technology with us? Get in touch: info@nextladder.com

Contributing authors: Kyle Nelson, Tamsin Chen, Rhett Dornbach-Bender, Ellie Bertani