Steve, Gideon: Thanks for noting/writing the Strategy article - a dead-on rationale behind social impact that positions it as a peer outcome to...money, the traditional business outcome, i.e. not as a lesser or competing outcome.
With that, we jump out of a closed social sector conversation to talk about convergence of profit and impact and perhaps use the successes and knowledge of the social sector as an example for any business, regardless of organization type.
Timely, as I noticed at the recent Global Philanthropy Forum panel on Impact Investing that the very last question from the audience was a sharp one, "We've talked for the last hour pretty much on financial returns, but we have to find a way to put social impact on equal footing - or else, why are we here?"
Gideon: the "tough points" you mention are ones that we may be gaining traction on - restated here, with a quick paraphrase.
Fuzziness: making meaningful qualitative measures is hard
Interdependence: no one organization can claim impact, but can pull up a seat at that table by regularly meeting and communicating mission goals and then putting those in the impact conversation
Multiple Scales: the complexity of impact on multiple levels maps directly to why we're here - we must share information, methods, problems, successes to estimate individual effectiveness as well as sector effectiveness on broader levels.
I think we may be gaining traction on these, at least in conversation getting closer to action - some references below to support that:
- on interdependence, multiple scales, and the folly of isolating "impact" by single goals or organizations - see Katya Smyth here: http://bit.ly/RRFgXy "There are new harms created when people live their lives striving honestly for one goal while we’re gathering data to measure how we’re doing in getting them to reach a different and competing one."
-on "deep branding" from Gideon's article- here is an article I wrote for AdAge in 2009 (http://bit.ly/10XGQM9), later featured on Tactical Philanthropy - http://bit.ly/10td5zL - the point - a whole brand includes social impact and not as a sacrifice
- Nikon Rasumov, Founder of Pullapproach: http://bit.ly/ImpactAndProfit -on organic data collection, similar to VisionSpring/Taro Works example - "the transaction cost for providing complete data through social impact questionnaires is still too high, relative to its added value. As a result, traditional data acquisition is infrequent and hinders wide range adoption of even free social measurement tools. ...An alternative social and financial reporting strategy is organic data acquisition (ODA), which accumulates data with a minimal transaction cost. ODA begins with intelligent process design because any data acquisition depends on the willingness of the user to provide data."
The unifier is still solid work, strategy, data from and on behalf of beneficiaries, customers, however we want to call it. Reporting impact without those is just paperwork. We can't require improvement without creating definite data intersections (p-o-s + data for VisionSpring) that make it easier and sharing data to do that.
Even at the most rigorously quantitative operations I've been a part of, qualitative dimensions weren't a hard sell, e.g. customer satisfaction projects in Dallas, TX with restaurant customers for Pepsi. They didn't just fit in the financial model. They were essential: We spent money on defining the dimensions of satisfaction and testing those for validity then investment. That would be "impact" in our case. I hope we continue to move this forward. More case studies are welcome: We will feature them on the site in an effort to get a better picture of the market for social sector data.
Yes, Eric, in many ways, the tool is the easy part compared to the the culture change necessary to bring data-driven thinking into an organization. One of the things I saw while running Groundwire was that among the client organizations we served, there were some who had stuff who really understood the power of the databases that we were helping them put in place in their organizations. Not to generalize, but many of these folks were younger, and we found that an hour invested with one of these individuals was worth more than ten hours on someone else. They got it. They understood the power of what the tools could deliver.
Hello, Gideon. Welcome to Markets For Good. The Taro Works example does point a way out of..."most social change organizations are simply not in a position to ground their evaluation efforts in broad-based data like what you are describing."
I'm talking more to the insight behind the solution than to the solution itself.
What I appreciate is the first recognition of the ROI calculation – implicit, explicit, whatever - and going from there. Data isn't free. There is room for much more investigation of ways to facilitate getting the info we need, especially when it's out there waiting on just another thoughtful way to get it.
Sheetal Singh of Techsoup makes an excellent case on the point in an earlier post: http://www.marketsforgood.org/making-data-an-afterthought/. She says: "We realized that when you are working with small organizations in constant crisis mode, thinking about data is a luxury. If we wanted the agencies to track and share data, we needed to give them a really good reason to do so." Read more for her examples of how to address that.
That's ROI and data thinking, not as a mental exercise, but infinitely more appropriately - on behalf of an organization doing effective work that could be made easier or better, as Steve demonstrates with the VisionSpring example.
On your last point: I remember growing up in Oak Cliff (Dallas, Tx) and all of us in school, church sharing an inside smile at the people and orgs who arrived for one intiative or another not recognizing that kids worldwide can easily differentiate the look that said “subject” from the one that said “partner.” We treated each accordingly. - Eric, Conversation Curator, Markets For Good.
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Eric J. Henderson says:
Steve, Gideon: Thanks for noting/writing the Strategy article - a dead-on rationale behind social impact that positions it as a peer outcome to...money, the traditional business outcome, i.e. not as a lesser or competing outcome. With that, we jump out of a closed social sector conversation to talk about convergence of profit and impact and perhaps use the successes and knowledge of the social sector as an example for any business, regardless of organization type. Timely, as I noticed at the recent Global Philanthropy Forum panel on Impact Investing that the very last question from the audience was a sharp one, "We've talked for the last hour pretty much on financial returns, but we have to find a way to put social impact on equal footing - or else, why are we here?" Gideon: the "tough points" you mention are ones that we may be gaining traction on - restated here, with a quick paraphrase. Fuzziness: making meaningful qualitative measures is hard Interdependence: no one organization can claim impact, but can pull up a seat at that table by regularly meeting and communicating mission goals and then putting those in the impact conversation Multiple Scales: the complexity of impact on multiple levels maps directly to why we're here - we must share information, methods, problems, successes to estimate individual effectiveness as well as sector effectiveness on broader levels. I think we may be gaining traction on these, at least in conversation getting closer to action - some references below to support that: - on interdependence, multiple scales, and the folly of isolating "impact" by single goals or organizations - see Katya Smyth here: http://bit.ly/RRFgXy "There are new harms created when people live their lives striving honestly for one goal while we’re gathering data to measure how we’re doing in getting them to reach a different and competing one." -on "deep branding" from Gideon's article- here is an article I wrote for AdAge in 2009 (http://bit.ly/10XGQM9), later featured on Tactical Philanthropy - http://bit.ly/10td5zL - the point - a whole brand includes social impact and not as a sacrifice - Nikon Rasumov, Founder of Pullapproach: http://bit.ly/ImpactAndProfit -on organic data collection, similar to VisionSpring/Taro Works example - "the transaction cost for providing complete data through social impact questionnaires is still too high, relative to its added value. As a result, traditional data acquisition is infrequent and hinders wide range adoption of even free social measurement tools. ...An alternative social and financial reporting strategy is organic data acquisition (ODA), which accumulates data with a minimal transaction cost. ODA begins with intelligent process design because any data acquisition depends on the willingness of the user to provide data." The unifier is still solid work, strategy, data from and on behalf of beneficiaries, customers, however we want to call it. Reporting impact without those is just paperwork. We can't require improvement without creating definite data intersections (p-o-s + data for VisionSpring) that make it easier and sharing data to do that. Even at the most rigorously quantitative operations I've been a part of, qualitative dimensions weren't a hard sell, e.g. customer satisfaction projects in Dallas, TX with restaurant customers for Pepsi. They didn't just fit in the financial model. They were essential: We spent money on defining the dimensions of satisfaction and testing those for validity then investment. That would be "impact" in our case. I hope we continue to move this forward. More case studies are welcome: We will feature them on the site in an effort to get a better picture of the market for social sector data.Gideon Rosenblatt says:
Yes, Eric, in many ways, the tool is the easy part compared to the the culture change necessary to bring data-driven thinking into an organization. One of the things I saw while running Groundwire was that among the client organizations we served, there were some who had stuff who really understood the power of the databases that we were helping them put in place in their organizations. Not to generalize, but many of these folks were younger, and we found that an hour invested with one of these individuals was worth more than ten hours on someone else. They got it. They understood the power of what the tools could deliver.Eric J. Henderson says:
Hello, Gideon. Welcome to Markets For Good. The Taro Works example does point a way out of..."most social change organizations are simply not in a position to ground their evaluation efforts in broad-based data like what you are describing." I'm talking more to the insight behind the solution than to the solution itself. What I appreciate is the first recognition of the ROI calculation – implicit, explicit, whatever - and going from there. Data isn't free. There is room for much more investigation of ways to facilitate getting the info we need, especially when it's out there waiting on just another thoughtful way to get it. Sheetal Singh of Techsoup makes an excellent case on the point in an earlier post: http://www.marketsforgood.org/making-data-an-afterthought/. She says: "We realized that when you are working with small organizations in constant crisis mode, thinking about data is a luxury. If we wanted the agencies to track and share data, we needed to give them a really good reason to do so." Read more for her examples of how to address that. That's ROI and data thinking, not as a mental exercise, but infinitely more appropriately - on behalf of an organization doing effective work that could be made easier or better, as Steve demonstrates with the VisionSpring example. On your last point: I remember growing up in Oak Cliff (Dallas, Tx) and all of us in school, church sharing an inside smile at the people and orgs who arrived for one intiative or another not recognizing that kids worldwide can easily differentiate the look that said “subject” from the one that said “partner.” We treated each accordingly. - Eric, Conversation Curator, Markets For Good.