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Like many nonprofits, we’re interested in knowing the impact we provide for our clients. What would their lives look like without the services we provide? Luckily, our work in the workforce development sector places us in a human services space with a pretty robust self-portrait. This space is the labor market, and the self-portrait comes from Labor Market Information (LMI), the data on the market which is continuously collected and analyzed by the government and by private researchers. This means that we rely quite a bit on the information collected and released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and by organizations like the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute.

Obviously, there is a lot of information to be found in these places. The next step in determining how we impact our clients’ lives is choosing what to look at to create a baseline for measurement against our own client data. What we choose forms the ‘Benefit’ side in what’s known as a Cost/Benefit Analysis, or CBA.

The main body of our work is in employment training and placement, which means our clients are most often characterized by unemployment and low income. Reversing those characteristics constitutes a main program success: reemployment. We track reemployment rates for our clients, but to what should we compare that rate? Luckily, the Department of Labor releases marketwide reemployment rates for unemployed workers, who we can assume are roughly equivalent (at least in the labor market) to our own clients – if they looked for work without working with us.

Next, we compare income characteristics of our reemployed clients with baseline rates. How long might our clients have retained employment without our services, and what wages might they have earned? For now, we assume that reemployed workers encounter conditions consistent with those who lost jobs after the recession – after all, wage growth and the unemployment have largely stagnated since we recovered from the recession’s trough, improving only a little over time. Baseline data on employment retention comes again from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this time from the JOLT Survey, which tracks job losses and gains throughout the economy.

These measurements – reemployment rates, employment retention rates, and reemployment wages – form much of the baseline to which we compare the impact of our services for clients. Of course, a number of other factors, like changes in tax and welfare status, volunteer hour impact, and in some cases wage growth over time, also inform our analysis, though to a lesser degree. Additionally, when we’re serving a unique population like seniors or veterans, we create specific baselines for them to preserve the accuracy of our comparison.

How do we compare? The answer is great news: for every dollar in costs, our clients benefit an average of $5.95. That’s a return of nearly 600 percent on the investments of our funders and donors! It’s a number that we here at Able are very proud of, not simply because it reflects the strength of our programming, but because it is strong proof that the work we do makes a huge difference in the lives of those who need our help.