Did you know the average human sees over 5,000 advertisements a day?  How many thousands of grant requests does a foundation receive each year?  Each ad, each grant request, hopes to catch attention and inspire a change in thought or action.  With all this clutter, how can you make your message stick?   Shock and awe…or data?  

For the second time in as many months, I’m disappointed in the Wall Street Journal’s choice to publish tired opinions and outdated views of corporate social responsibility. 

The following excerpt is taken from an article by Jason Saul and Cheryl Davenport currently featured on CRO Magazine's website and to be published in the October print edition.    

As a mission-driven organization itself, Mission Measurement strives to measure and increase its own social impact.  The scope of this impact can be seen in the investments made by the organizations with whom we work – from school networks to Fortune 100 corporations to social service nonprofits. Through our work, we help organizations examine and realign their budgets to maximize their impact, both internally and through grantmaking and other investments.

A fascinating study and article by the LA Times discusses the role of value-added analysis in teacher evaluation.  This is a controversial subject, at least among teachers unions and politicians.  The role of value-added evaluation is presented most often as an input in to firing decisions, with the question being one of proportion relative to other inputs in to the evaluation.  This does education measurement a disservice.

BusinessWeek has recently published their list of the 25 Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs.   Below is an excerpt from the interview:

Stanford Social Innovation Review just published a wonderful article by Geoff Mulgan entitled "Measuring Social Value."It is very timely, in fact, because it continues the commentary of a recent Thoughtscrap by my colleague, Rick Groves, which provides a compelling argument on the need for the right data, whether quantitative or qualitative, when measuring social impact as opposed to data for data sake. I will let you all read through this piece but will offer up some of my favorite points:

It’d be fair to say Bill Gates and Warren Buffett make up the Dynamic Duo of the philanthropy world.  Much like Batman and Robin, Gates and Buffett seem to be able to surprise the world when we least expect it, fighting social problems for the greater good with their immense wealth.  They have quickly and smartly realized that with wealth comes power, and with power comes responsibility.  More than ever before, the public is looking to the world’s elite to solve social problems because they have the means to scale social efforts with Batmobile-like speed.

You've done an evaluation and you're doing ongoing performance measurement.  You are on top of your measurement game.  You have all this hard data that suggests what you're doing works and that your model deserves to be grown to scale.  But you're struggling to get people to listen.  You believe you deserve their support, but can't seem to get potential funders, policy makers, etc. to see it the same way.  Why?

On Thursday July 22, 2010, the College Board hosted a convening of education leaders to address now ongoing concerns about college attainment rates in the United States. They have followed a long train of education stakeholders including Grantmakers for Education, the National Governors Association, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Obama Administration that have shined intense light on the college attainment deficits in the US. Like nearly all education and social challenges, the causes are multidimensional and the parties necessary to solve the problems are equally broad and varied.