Meet Jacob Allen, Sr. Partner & Managing Director, Social Impact Practice

Jacob Allen joined Cicero in 2013 and has been bringing his global expertise in strategy, impact evaluation, international development, CSR, performance measurement, and executive leadership to clients and the Social Impact practice since then. As Managing Director of Cicero’s Social Impact practice, Jacob works with mission-driven organizations to maximize their impact through initiatives like ESG and CSR programs, M&E systems, and multi-sector partnerships. ??

Over the past 20 years, Jacob has worked with hundreds of mission-driven organizations around the world, including leading corporations and corporate philanthropies, international NGOs, and nonprofit providers. He has led the strategic design, measurement, and implementation of social impact programs run by former US presidents, major corporations, private foundations, and national and global nonprofits. A sample of clients includes Prudential Financial, Bristol Myers Squibb, BDT Capital, Goldman Sachs, Textron Systems, Lumina Foundation, Strada Education Network, the George W. Bush Institute, the Clinton Foundation, Wounded Warrior Project, United Way, Junior Achievement, the Alzheimer’s Association, the Nature Conservancy, the National Academy Foundation, and many more.??

In a recent client engagement, Jacob and his team helped a large corporate foundation design a measurement system to track the ways in which the foundation’s grants were improving the equity and impact of health interventions around the world. Now, the organization can continuously monitor and learn from the results of each grantee’s efforts as well as the entire portfolio’s efforts. “Whether it’s devising ways to measure improvements in health or engineering a cross-sector strategy to create a thriving, equitable national ecosystem for adaptive sports, I love tackling complex societal challenges and developing simple but effective solutions that real organizations can implement in a really complex world,” Jacob says.?

Jacob is an expert and thought leader in the social impact space, with major articles and reports that include Quantifying the Value of Impact Investing (also here ), The Giving State , and Stop Starving Scale: Unlocking the Potential of Global NGOs . For more than eight years, Jacob has served on the international board of Mary’s Meals, a nonprofit that provides a daily meal in school to more than 2 million children living in desperate poverty in 20 countries around the world.??

Prior to joining Cicero, Jacob helped deliver value to clients as a Manager at The Bridgespan Group where he advised U.S. and global nonprofit and philanthropic executives, led teams to conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses, developed financial models, and built implementation tools and systems. As a Project Lead at NP Strategies, Jacob solved strategic challenges for nonprofit organizations in Southern California and co-designed and instructed case-based, graduate-level strategy and nonprofit management courses.??

Jacob completed doctoral work in International Affairs and Political Science from the University of California San Diego and earned a master’s degree in International Comparative Education from Stanford University and a bachelor’s in International Studies from Brigham Young University.??