Featured in Community Directors

ImpactLab CEO Maria Owen speaks with Community Directors about making impact measurement useful, connecting frontline data with academic and government evidence, and helping organisations turn better information into better decisions.

Published:
September 3, 2026
June 2, 2026
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Community Directors
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Featured in Community Directors

“The key thing is to make the measurement useful and relevant to the people delivering the service, because then it shifts from being a compliance requirement, to being about getting insight that can help grow the impact of the service." - Maria Owen

“The key thing is to make the measurement useful and relevant to the people delivering the service, because then it shifts from being a compliance requirement, to being about getting insight that can help grow the impact of the service." - Maria Owen

I’m from a business analytics background, so my first job, prior to ImpactLab, was at the Boston Consulting Group in Sydney. I was doing a lot of analytics and strategy for using the analytics across the private and public sectors, but I did a Jawun secondment as part of that where I went over to Kununurra in WA for a couple of months.

That experience blew my mind because I realised that the toilet companies I was working with had a much better understanding of the users of their service than the Australian government did of its most vulnerable kids.

I guess what got me into ImpactLab was seeing the opportunity to better connect the decision-making to a really good data-driven view of where is the money actually going, who’s it reaching and how does that make a difference, and then how can we use that information to make more of a difference with the next decision? A lot of decision-oriented analytics are really powerful; however, what the social sector tends to be using, which is also valuable, is academic analytics. What you need for decision-making is a bit different, and so that’s a gap, I think, that I really want to help solve.

Read the full article

I’m from a business analytics background, so my first job, prior to ImpactLab, was at the Boston Consulting Group in Sydney. I was doing a lot of analytics and strategy for using the analytics across the private and public sectors, but I did a Jawun secondment as part of that where I went over to Kununurra in WA for a couple of months.

That experience blew my mind because I realised that the toilet companies I was working with had a much better understanding of the users of their service than the Australian government did of its most vulnerable kids.

I guess what got me into ImpactLab was seeing the opportunity to better connect the decision-making to a really good data-driven view of where is the money actually going, who’s it reaching and how does that make a difference, and then how can we use that information to make more of a difference with the next decision? A lot of decision-oriented analytics are really powerful; however, what the social sector tends to be using, which is also valuable, is academic analytics. What you need for decision-making is a bit different, and so that’s a gap, I think, that I really want to help solve.

Read the full article

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