PerfectXL Blog
Using Excel for Social Impact!
This blog is based on an interview with Dimitri Katsanos, a social impact research consultant that founded his own company: DimiCor Research Consultants (DRC Impact Reporting). Dimitri, through this company, provides affordable social impact reports to companies that might not be able to research the impact of a specific project effectively on their own. He currently does this primarily for real estate companies and projects but is looking to expand into more areas in the future. He provides objective 3rd party reports on factors such as the cost of living fluctuation or the displacement of individuals that could take place as a result of a new building project, as well as the environmental impact and an evaluation of sustainable practices used. Long introduction, but enough from me, let’s hear from him!
“Well, to be honest I didn’t think too much about the social impact that these projects can have until I went to university. At Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business most students are very career oriented with an intense focus on making money. This was probably how I felt for most of my time there. On the other hand I was confronted with ideas around social change at Georgetown as well, I was involved with the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation where they teach students how to enact social based change. The influence of one of the professors working there pushed me towards wanting to start my own company and fight for social change.”
Inspiration can come from many places, and it’s awesome to see how inspired Dimitri is, so I asked him how it’s going so far.
“Of course, starting on your own is always challenging but I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to partner on all future projects with a specific real estate company, that gives me some breathing room. It’s also great to see in meetings that they present the fact that they have thought about the social impact of their projects, and that strikes a chord with investors, they find it important to know about how projects are affecting people. The general consciousness for ESG factors (Environmental, Social, Governance) has been rising, whether through moral drive or through government requirements, either way people are more aware, which is a good thing! The difficulty is that most ESG reports are done by huge consultants which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and those companies are not built to just provide these reports, they have other requirements. That’s why I think there’s a hole in the market for what I do, I care about the people that are being displaced, and my reports are much more affordable to encourage more companies to do their due diligence.”
Where do you see the company growing to in the future?
“Ultimately I want to be doing more reports for more industries. I think the best way to accomplish this will to be to build up a team of professionals, each with emphasis on different elements of these reports, one for environmental issues, one of change in cost or value of properties, one for tracking potential displacements and influence on people, ect. This way I can focus on communicating more directly with clients, I can work to grow the awareness around social impact reporting, and try to bring in more clients to widen the impact of what we are doing as much as possible! In scaling to different industries I’ll also need to develop new metrics. Currently I do most of my calculations in Excel pulling massive sets of Census data to be able to compute what the exact implications of a certain project might be.”
You mentioned that you use Excel for a lot of your reporting, why Excel and not something else?
“There are multiple opinions on how to calculate something like gentrification and I really had to produce my own metrics and calculations. Something that is clear and steadfast so it will be generally accepted. I studied business operations and information management alongside finance which is the closest thing you can get to an Excel intensive course, I realized I really had a knack for modelling and Visual Basic. Excel is also the format you pull census data in, so it just made sense with my background and the flexibility I need when creating models, that I should use Excel. It is important that I have a clear and reliable model to be able to calculate all these metrics to be able to generate an accurate and trustworthy social impact report.”
I guess it makes sense then why Dimitri found us at PerfectXL and we’re really happy to partner with him on that. Social projects like these are so important to improving the consciousness around the impact we have, we at PerfectXL want to continue supporting projects like this! In a really fun way I guess Dimitri “Uses Excel to enact social change.” You can find out all about him and his company on his website: https://www.dimiresearch.com/
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