Enhancing Impact for a Mission-Driven Housing Lender

Housing Trust Silicon Valley (HTSV) is a community development financial institution (CDFI) that supports low- and moderate-income families by financing affordable rental housing and by helping eligible home buyers purchase their first homes. HTSV engaged Social Finance to help clarify organization-wide goals for impact and to create impact measurement and management (IMM) tools that capture related data and inform investment decisions. 

Through this engagement, HTSV is creating an organization-wide IMM strategy that ensures impact considerations drive financing and funding and demonstrates how HTSV financing can drive meaningful, equitable community impact.  

Goals 

• Define shared, organization-wide impact “North Star” goals that reflect HTSV’s mission, values and priorities. 
• Develop an IMM framework that helps team assess if and how potential investments and loans are aligned with HTSV goals and priorities. 
• Strengthen the use of evidence and insight in lending, grantmaking, and programmatic decision-making. 
• Improve the consistency and clarity of impact data across the organization. 

The Work

• Organizational alignment: Engaging staff across departments through workshops, focus groups, and interviews to co-create a shared understanding of what impact success looks like, and distilling findings into North Star goals and a Theory of Change. 
• Development of systems for capturing and communicating impact and using impact data to inform decisions: Developing standard operating procedures for IMM.  These procedures will detail how HTSV collects and uses impact data to inform decision making, support reporting and communications, and guide supports that HTSV provides homebuyers and investees.   
• Impact scorecard: Designing an impact rating that makes impact considerations explicit, consistent, and comparable across transactions. 
• Implementation, capacity building, and reporting supports: Supporting HTSV staff in implementing IMM, refining tools, and using data for both reporting and decision-making.   

The Results 

This work is in progress, expected to be completed in early 2027.