Siebert Williams Shank
Community Impact Project | Feb. 2024 - Jun. 2024
Background:
Siebert Williams Shank is a full service Investment Banking and Financial Services company. Its municipal finance department has underwritten and transacted on more than $1 trillion of municipal bonds on behalf of state and local governments, non-profit organizations, health systems, school districts, and more. Siebert was on a mission to become the first of its peers to put the real-world impact of its deal activity in tangible terms so that clients and the broader municipal community could better understand its value and contribution to the world. I worked with them to bring this vision to life.
I served as Principal Consultant, performing all data, research, and design duties myself.
Identifying the real need
The leadership at Siebert originally reached out for help with creating the company's inaugural Impact Report. The marketing director in charge of the project had been asked to incorporate data points that included, but also went beyond, typical things like donations and volunteer hours. Without a deep understanding of the business of public finance, the MD was at a loss for how she could actually approach this, and their desire to release the report within the first half of the year was slipping away.
Having previously worked as a banker at UBS, transacting on $4 billion+ in municipal deals for big clients like the State of California, Los Angeles USD, and the University of California Berkeley, I had the context & subject matter expertise that would allow me to bridge the gap.
After a few meetings with key stakeholders, I realized the real need wasn't just a few nice tables & visuals to help fill up their report. The data they wanted to leverage didn't exist in any trackable form. They needed a full data strategy, a method for data collection & cleaning, and a system to maintain the data so bankers and admin could easily refresh and reuse it for pitches. The Impact Report was the first output, but they really needed a system.
I wasn't there to help them create a single report. I was there to help them build a strategy and a system for data collection. They needed information that was current, accurate, and easy to leverage in various outputs like reports, pitches & RFPs for years to come.
Thinking creatively & strategically to build something new
The core creative leap: turning deals into human impact
The hardest part of this project was translating thousands of financial deals into something people could feel. I bucketed the deal list by transaction type and chose a human-scale metric for each bucket. For example, school deals measured in students reached, hospital deals measured in patients served, housing deals measured in housing units created. We wanted the numbers to tell an impact story instead of a financial one.
Sourcing data that didn’t exist yet
I established the most reliable source for each metric and formalized a collection and cleaning process. For employee volunteer hours and donations, which weren’t centrally tracked, I designed a company survey that doubled as the long-term annual collection method. I presented my strategy, secured sign-off, and ran weekly check-ins to keep stakeholders aligned and unblock any issues that appeared.
Designing for handoff
I deliberately chose Power BI with a single multi-sheet Excel file as the primary data source. After thoroughly assessing their needs and weighing the simple data relationships, the compressed timeline, and, above all, a non-technical team that had to maintain the system after I left, I knew this would be the best setup for them. I built the data model connections in Power BI and designed a suite of dynamic dashboards for them to use. I also documented the full data collection methodology in a report so it could live on without me.
 The engagement survey I designed to capture employee volunteer hours. |  The data methodology guide I put together so they could maintain the system. |
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 An example of one of the dashboards I created to help visualize the data. |
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Balancing tradeoffs
There were some key decisions I made that required tradeoffs:
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Used Power BI and Excel instead of a heavier database. It’s less powerful, but it fit the absence of any complex data relationships, a need for polished dashboards, the tight deadline, and - most importantly - the team could keep using it after I left.
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Used reasonable estimates instead of chasing exact numbers. Some of the figures I collected from reliable public sources were approximate, but they made the impact easy to grasp for a non-technical audience, which was the whole point. I made sure to cite my sources and encouraged the team to add appropriate footnotes to the report.
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Built one survey that solved two problems simultaneously. Collecting the employee volunteer data was a small roadblock during the project because we were relying on bankers to think back 5 years and give us all the data they could. It definitely took more work upfront, but capturing the backlogged missing data right away allowed the firm to establish valuable trend data and set them up to better maintain the data going forward year after year.
Solutions are not always: "make the biggest, most powerful & impressive thing". Great solutions are about thoughtfully assessing the user needs, goals, and limitations in order to deliver something that works very well for them.
An outcome to be proud of
Most people never see how municipal bonds touch real lives. Quantifying and humanizing the deal activity brought a touch of credibility & respect for the tremendous work supported by the firm, making the report's concept a true differentiator no other competitor had pulled off. The report was released to clients on time and featured on Siebert's website. The system I helped build also ensured the data & dashboards could be maintained by the firm on a go-forward basis.
View the Report