Public-private partnerships (PPPs) – or public-private alliances (PPAs) - are receiving increasing amounts of attention. There is broad acknowledgement across the public and private sectors that sustainable solutions to serious development issues require collaboration.  Additionally, the current economic conditions create an intensified desire to mitigate risk and to share resources and expertise.  Under President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton, the U.S.

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.    

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?

Here’s a challenge: next time you are on an international flight, grab the in-flight magazine and see if you can find an advertisement from a European or Asian country touting their ideal conditions for setting up a business.  Many of the advertisements discuss in great detail their pro-business policies and highly educated workforce as well as the necessary infrastructure to make your overseas enterprise successful. 

I recently viewed a video of a presentation given by Esther Duflo at PopTech 2009.  (Esther Duflo is a development economist who has garnered significant attention for her work on randomized evaluation.  She is based at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, which she co-founded.)  What I found most intriguing about her commentary is the way she highlights evaluation as a way to figure out what works in development.  She starts with what we all know to be true: development problems are big, intimidating, and seemingly intractable.  But fortunately, she doesn’t stop there.

For the last 15 years I have been focused on a single knotty question: how do you measure social impact?   Across the sector, billions have been spent on evaluations, millions have been spent on capacity building, thousands of studies have been published and hundreds of conference sessions have been held.  Yet no one seems to have come up with the answer.  How is it that we can measure the temperature on Mars, but we can’t measure what happens within the orbit of a nonprofit organization?  Why is measurement so confounding?  

EdWeek’s brief profile on John Q. Easton, head of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), drives home the importance and renewed focus on relevance and usefulness in education research. Over the years, we have collected vast sums of education data about students, teachers, schools, districts, states, and countries.

Health care is a sticky issue.