As data consultant to Grant Philanthropic Advisors, Elisa works with clients to assess their own philanthropic impact and trends, analyzing their historic giving data and identifying patterns in their grant-making. All of which informs nuanced discussions around strategy and goal setting for future giving. This is where science meets art in serving our clients’ desire for effective philanthropy.
Elisa earned a bachelor’s degree in American Studies and a master’s degree in Statistics before beginning her career as a data scientist at IBM, building machine learning models in the retail, aviation, and weather industries. After five years at IBM, she decided to pursue her own venture, Explore Philanthropy, a platform and dashboard for philanthropists to find, compare, and analyze organizations that best fulfill their giving mission. She believes that change-makers can increase their giving impact when they have the best information available to them.
Elisa lives in Charleston, where she serves on the board of the Charleston Library Society and volunteers with and gives to several local non-profit organizations. A self-proclaimed data-nerd, if you can’t find her behind a Python script, she’s probably chasing after her two (soon to be four!) young children.