Observe · Link · Interpret

Your work creates patterns.
Oli puts them to work.

Oli is a strategic learning platform that makes institutional knowledge findable, searchable, and useful — built for civil society organizations to surface evidence of impact, translate it across roles, and fuel the conversations that drive real change.

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15+ organizations engaged Designed by practitioners Bias-aware by design

The challenge

Change is hard to see. The knowledge to understand it is harder to reach.

Social change is complex, long-arc, and marked by resistance and reversal. The organizations doing this work accumulate enormous insight, but most of it never becomes usable knowledge.

Wisdom walks out the door

Great program officers make decisions based on years of field experience. But that expertise often stays with the individual — and is rarely captured or synthesized before it's gone.

Evidence is buried

Leadership, boards, donors, and program staff are asking harder questions about impact. The answers are usually there — in reports, notes, and conversations — but pulling them out takes time evaluation teams don't have.

Evaluations arrive too late

External evaluations are expensive, slow, and often come after the next grant cycle or strategic planning period. The existing solutions don't meet the challenge.

Knowledge is siloed

Years of grants, evaluations, and grantee conversations could answer strategic questions — but they're disconnected, unsearchable, and at risk of being lost.

The answers exist inside your organization. Oli helps you reach them.

Oli doesn't generate verdicts or produce scorecards. It opens a conversation — drawing on your own evidence, in the language of your theory of change, to help your whole team think together about where you are and where you're headed.

What Oli does

AI that asks better questions, not just faster answers.

Oli is built on a structured framework for how social change works — over 20 strategies grounded in social science with related indicators of progress — so it can identify where change has occurred, even when the arc is long and the path is uneven.

Organizes your internal knowledge

Reads documents, transcripts, and GMS data in any format. No data migration, no parallel records. Works directly with GivingData, Fluxx, or Salesforce.

Connects to external signals

Links your institutional history to licensed research and field publications — highlighting when internal patterns align with or diverge from what the broader sector knows, including sources in multiple languages.

Identifies patterns across time

Processes questions at any level — one grantee, one strategy, the whole portfolio. Returns synthesized, source-cited answers in minutes, with every assumption surfaced. Your judgment does the rest.

Configured to your strategies

Oli brings a social science-grounded framework of change strategies, adapted to fit each organization's own language, theory of change, and portfolio — or works from whatever shapes the work: field focus, community commitments, or conviction about who's doing the most important work.

Surfaces equity concerns and data gaps

Flags where evidence is thin, which questions remain unanswered, and where patterns suggest equity issues that deserve closer attention — before those gaps become problems.

No coding required

Organized around your theory of change, not a spreadsheet or data schema. Program teams can ask strategic questions in plain language — and get source-cited answers in minutes, without technical support.

Our approach

Reflection, not verdicts.

Most AI evaluation tools generate rankings, scores, and recommendations. Oli does something different — it opens institutional conversations.

  • 1

    Designed by practitioners

    Oli was founded by senior program leaders with decades of experience in civil society, social justice, development, and global philanthropy — not by technologists retrofitting AI onto existing frameworks.

  • 2

    Grounded in social science

    The underlying framework draws on decades of social change research — over 20 change strategies and related indicators that reflect how change actually happens in complex political environments.

  • 3

    Values-based

    A community advisory panel of practitioners and researchers ensures Oli remains accountable to the sector it serves — not just to the organizations that build it.

The core idea
"Your work creates patterns. Oli puts them to work."

Most organizations accumulate deep, sophisticated knowledge about social change — in reports, field notes, staff experience, community relationships. Oli draws that knowledge out, connects it to evidence of change, and puts it back in the hands of the people doing the work.

Who it's for

Built for the whole institution.

Oli serves every team that needs to understand, communicate, and act on evidence of change — not just the evaluators.

Strategy

Synthesizes decades of learning to inform future direction. Reveals ways to increase impact and informs strategic and budget decisions.

Program

Fuels strategic team conversations. Reveals where and why there is progress. Answers questions at every level: grant, cohort, and program.

Evaluation

Identifies outcomes across every level of programming. Surfaces learning agendas. Strengthens understanding of where change is happening and why.

Grants Management

Tracks patterns across the portfolio. Surfaces information for reporting and compliance. Connects grant data to strategy in real time.

Communications

Turns data into compelling impact stories. Sharpens case-making for the work. Pulls years of data together in minutes for a board, a donor, or a report.

Built on values

How we think about responsibility.

Oli is designed for organizations that hold deep commitments to the communities they serve. Those commitments shaped every architectural decision.

Security

  • Your data never trains a model
  • Your data stays yours — full stop
  • Redaction decisions stay with your institution

Accountability

  • No verdicts, rankings, or scores
  • Community Advisory Panel reviews our frameworks annually
  • No coding required — Oli works within your theory of change

Transparency

  • Every response cites its sources and surfaces its assumptions
  • Distinguishes internal knowledge from external research
  • No scores, no dashboards, no red/yellow/green ratings

The team

Built by people who've done this work.

Oli's founders bring decades of experience in social change strategy, technology, and organizational learning.

LC

Lesley Carson

Co-Founder

30+ years in philanthropy and social change. Former program officer who designed Oli from the questions no existing tool could answer.

MM

Manisha Mehta

Co-Founder

Strategy and operations leader with deep experience in mission-driven organizations and social impact work — a core architect of Oli from the beginning.

T+R

Technology & Research

Engineering and Research Team

Experienced AI engineers and social scientists with deep backgrounds in natural language processing, knowledge systems, and field-based social change research. Details coming soon.

Ready to think differently about impact?

We're working with a small number of civil society organizations to develop Oli. If you're interested in an early conversation, we'd love to hear from you.

Request a conversation

Or reach us directly at hello@askoli.co