Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

Sections
Personal tools
You are here: Home → Features → Issue Areas → Impact Measurement
 
Document Actions

Impact Measurement

Find all the resources, blogs, and discussions about measuring and managing the impact of social ventures.

Blogs  

SVT on Impact  Sara Olsen & Brett Galimidi from Social Venture Technology (SVT) help organizations measure, manage and communicate social and environmental impact by using innovative metrics, analysis and information management tools.

Read the latest:

"Smells Like Wall Street"- Executives Weigh in on SROI

 

The elephant in the impact measurement room is that it might not always be such a good thing to be transparent about our impact. Aside from the usual concerns about cost and time, what mental obstacles hinder impact measurement? To unpack this question, SVT and NYU’s Stern School of Business are teaming on a series of Roundtables to ask for-profit and nonprofit executives what they really think about the concept of “Social Return on Investment,” or “SROI.” Here are some of the observations we've heard so far.

The phrase SROI is intuitive. People who haven’t heard it before immediately grok that it speaks to the idea of quantifying the non-financial benefits created by a given entity relative to investment.

Beyond that, opinion seems to split into two camps, the Pro and the Con- with many people holding both opinions simultaneously.

Pro:
  • Evolution
    • It’s part of the professionalization of the field. It implies strategy, invites a conversation about how we can be more strategic.
    • When you hear “impact,” you think about the cost of measuring it. But “return” sounds like efficiency.
    • It’s of interest to investors or donors who bring expectations of more rigor.
    • Social enterprise has more business thinking [than traditional development organizations]. Attaching a value to social and environmental things, I think that’s a good thing.
  • A bridge to the finance world
    • It’s in alignment with the CFO or investor. I would be comfortable having that conversation [about social impact] using those terms. If you come with ‘social impact’ only, they’d say, “Why are you coming to me?” Today they don’t know how they fit. SROI helps them get into it.
    • It holds the potential to create a marketplace. I get a mental picture of a stock exchange for social value-- it’s exciting.
    • In sum: "The promise to me of social enterprise is sustainability. The term SROI is about sustainability."
Con:
  • A fuzzy straightjacket
    • I’ve never been sure how to measure it. It’s fuzzy…. tricky to wrap my head around.
    • It implies boiling things down to one or two metrics. Is that useful?
    • A quantitative goal is good I suppose, but there is not such a quantitative story in agriculture- if you try to use a clean, neat metric you might be overlooking some important impact- one that’s unexpected, unquantifiable, or that takes a long time to manifest.
    • I felt frustrated [in an social investment fund that quantified impact] with the way it limited the types of businesses we would invest in.
  • “Smells like Wall Street”
    • On the one hand, the term implies comparison of apples to oranges. Arts vs. environment would be ridiculous, but it has that connotation.
    • I don’t like the term, I wish it had not been coined. This is not vocabulary we should not borrow. The words bring a lot of baggage into this space that shouldn’t be there. We need an entirely new dictionary.
    • An alternative term without its own baggage is hard to find, but should be found.
    • In sum: It’s an interesting time for the field of impact evaluation, but the language can be dangerous."

One eloquent statement came from a film entrepreneur:

“I think it’s a good thing that business is waking up, but shoehorning [social value] through another frame that was created to do something else I don’t think is right. The frame of ROI was created for efficiency, and the people in charge of it are given authority based on effectiveness in that area, not on moral leadership.”

Read more.

Discussions

Design for Social Impact Hosted by Jocelyn Wyatt, 2008-08-19

Outcomes Measurement Hosted by Debra Natenshon, 2008-03-04

Beyond-the-Walls Leadership (1) Hosted by Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant, authors of Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits, present how some of the most successful nonprofits achieve wide scale, systemic social change.  This is the first of a three part discussion series and examines the first two practices of High-Impact Nonprofits - Advocacy and Business Partnerships.  2008-02-28
Beyond-the-Walls Leadership (2) Part 2:  Evangelists and Networking
Beyond-the-Walls Leadership (3) Part 3:  Adaptation and Leadership

New Metrics for Today's Social Entrepreneurs Hosted by Patrick O'Heffernan 2007-06-19
Scaling Capacities Hosted by Steven LaFrance who shares the seven critical scaling capacities for effectively growing impact,  2007-10-04
Social Entrepreneurship is about Innovation and Impact, Not Income Hosted by J. Gregory Dees, 2003-09

Global X Video Interviews

Fazel Abed, Founder of BRAC, "You need to be ambitious! Build an organization to its full capacity and grow it. Don't be satisfied too early, and you will have a bigger impact in your work."

Edgardo Salomón, Founder of FINSOL His keys to making a big social impact are to hire the right people and plan to scale. "The most important challenge is access to managerial talent. Capital is always available for good projects. The main problem is talent." "There is no success without scale, and that's why networking is so important"

[more Global X Interviews]

 

Podcasts

Jessica Shortall - Uzbekistan, 2008-06-18  Jessica Shortall, Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan (2000-01), is the Founder of Catalyst Strategy Advisors in London, where she advises businesses on how to operate for the social good while making a profit.

Omar Yaqub , 2008-06-18, Omar Yaqub helped start an $11 million investment fund in Canada for non-profit organizations, co-founded a software company and works for MBAs Without Borders. Blended value uses lines of questioning that empirically explore how a project or business has improved people’s lives or the environment for the better. Rather than looking at activities undertaken, it focuses on impact.

Gary Kosman, 2008-05-20, Gary Kosman received an Echoing Green fellowship in 2003 to launch America Learns, a for-profit educational performance and accountability firm now reaching more than 20,000 students across 14 countries.  Gary Kosman tracks his social impact through constant interviews with his clients, and he asks his customers to provide case studies of good practice.

Steve Wright - Micronesia, 2008- 06-18, Steve Wright, Peace Corps volunteer in Micronesia (1989-1991), now with the Salesforce Foundation, where he helps the non-profit sector use data more effectively. “Maintain rigor on using data to measure your social impact and keep it pre-eminent. The bottom line is a better world; not more revenue.” He urges social entrepreneurs to use data to understand their progress both internally and across sectors.

Heather Franzese - Mali, 2007-06-05, Heather Franzese, Peace Corps volunteer in Mali (1999–2001), worked for Oxfam, KickStart and Transfair, the global organization that enables sustainable development and community empowerment by cultivating equitable global trade and certifying and promoting Fair Trade products. While there, she would calculate the SROI – Social Return on Investment- on the funds she raised. She discusses the ways in which she did those calculations, pointing out that different businesses and organization may do it differently.

[more podcasts]

Jobs

[view impact and investment

jobs

]

 

Opportunities

[view

opportunities

]

 

Wiki Resources & Information


Hybrid Model

Impact Assessment

 

Scaling for Social Entrepreneurs

 

Other Blog Mentions and Impact Seminars:

 

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, What's the IMPACT of this all?, 2008-03-27 Skoll World Forum session vdeo and blog post on interactive session exploring various approaches to assessing impact.

Empathy as a Tool for Social Impact - IDEO

Measuring Impact through Social Capital Assessment 2008-04-18  This session focused on SOCAT--a method used to assess community needs and assets before, after, and during a project is implemented. How do you know your ...

Metrics for Love?, 2008-04-29, Omar wrestles with age-old questions of how social entrepreneurs actually measure the ‘good’ they’re putting into the world…

The Five Meanings of Scale, 2007-02-27, Introduction by Peter Frumpkin

BACO Metrics & Measuring What Counts, Keely Stevenson, 2007-01-30

Social Impact Assessment The Rockefeller and Goldman Sachs Foundations hosted a conversation among grantmakers and investors on the topic of Social Impact Assessment in March 2003. ...

Business Social Ventures - Critical Path for Global Impact? Sponsored by Ashoka (November 2003 - Closed)

Double Bottom Line  The Rockefeller Foundation's Double Bottom Line Project produced the first catalog of methods that for-profit and nonprofit social ventures and enterprises ...

Other Impact Search Results on Social Edge for:

impact, impact measurement, scaling, double and triple bottom line, social return on investment (SROI)