Video blog with Sara Olsen at Social Capital Markets 08
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Sara Olsen speaks with John Ince, a video blogger at SoCap08, on the impetus behind founding SVT Group, what we do at SVT Group, measuring impact, and why information about social and environmental value is an asset.
No commentsInterview with Sara Olsen discussing gourmet carbon at SoCap08
‘Gourmet carbon’ in Mexico from JD Lasica on Vimeo.
Watch this 9 minute interview with SVT Founding Partner, Sara Olsen, filmed during SoCap08. Sara discusses social enterprises and “gourmet carbon” work conducted by Patricia Ruiz Corzo’s Grupo Ecologico Sierra Gorda in Mexico.
No commentsSoCap ‘08- join the impact conversation
The first Social Capital Markets Conference (SoCap08) took place this month in San Francisco and I record here a few developments from the conference relevant to our impact conversation and invite you to join the conversation begun there.
SoCap08’s tagline refers to the “intersection of money and meaning” where “doing well and doing good is the mantra of a new generation of entrepreneurs and the organizations that invest in them.” SVT’s friend and the founding steering committee member of www.xigi.net, Kevin Jones, produced SoCap08, and pointed out in his opening remarks the fortuitous timing as well as the gathering momentum that the conference represented. Conference organizers expected 300 attendees. But over 600 registered; 50% did so in the last 3 weeks, which are some of the worst weeks in global investing history. The conference fee was around $1000 and people flew in from all over the world to attend, which is the most basic indicator of the excitement, energy and dedication gathering around the movement. Perhaps the meltdown actually catalyzed this convergence. As the Skoll Foundation’s Latest News Blog notes “many see the financial meltdown as a unique opportunity to promote the idea of social capital markets and double or triple bottom line accounting. The meltdown has revealed the risk associated with profit maximization at all costs.”
In a social capitalist economy, how do we measure impact?
A question that surfaced in seemingly every panel and sidebar conversation at SoCap08 centered on how to measure impact. On day three of the conference (the unconference participant -led day), a group of us who are keenly interested in impact measurement gathered together in one breakout room for two hours to see how far we could hash it out. Facilitated by a stellar combination of Tris Lumley of New Philanthropy Capital, Allan Benamer and Jeff Tuller of Socialmarkets.org, Paul Herman of HIP Investor, Alison King, Sara Olsen, and fueled by some 20 vocal participants, we came up with a lot of questions and not as many answers. Some of the questions on people’s minds included:
• What standards should we use to measure organization and program impact?
• How do we make measurement simple without losing track of outcomes and credibility?
• What is the “currency” of the social capital markets? How can social currency be created?
• What are the barriers to measurement? (I.e. why isn’t everyone already measuring their impact if it’s so central to the social capital market conversation?)
Join the conversation
The room was filled with people doing things to answer these questions through their work. But it was clear that two hours could not do the topic justice. The concrete outcomes of the discussion involved (unsurprisingly) continuing the discussion. Specifically, the group supported Tris’s idea to create an industry association of Impact Analysts, several parties agreed to collaborate to advance a clearinghouse of impact measurement information (at socialimpacts.org you can see the beginnings of a database of impact measurements, which will be expanded upon through the group’s efforts and by linking up with New Philanthropy Capital’s related effort), and an online group will be formed for day-to-day communication (the location is TBD but we’ll post it here when it is set up so if you want to you can join). Feel free to leave comments here about what you would have wanted to see if you’d been in the room, or if you were there what you thought of the conversation!
Social and environmental impact measurement has definitely piqued the interest of those joining the social capital markets. It is also clear that impact measurement is relatively new and lacks universal terminology, definitions and alignment. Collaborating will help us create the language that will enable the market’s conversation.
This entry was originally published on the Skoll Foundation’s SocialEdge.org website on our other blog - SVT on Impact.
No commentsImpact Map is live!
Here is the pilot version of the Impact Map- this shows the countries in the world where 24 different approaches to measuring impact. Our colleague in Bangkok, Pattraporn Yamla-or, and Chad Andrews from Presta both helped put this together.
Later we plan to make this map interactive so other approaches or implementations can be added by the community- to track how impact measurement is growing around the world.
It’s worth noting that in their essence, most of the approaches follow a very similar set of steps. The approaches can be read about in the Catalog commissioned by the Rockefeller Impact Investor Collaborative.
No commentsGooglemap of impact measures around the world
I am creating a googlemap that shows where different impact measurement approaches are being used around the world.
No comments2008 Global Social Venture Competition Pitches and Symposium
Copied wholesale from the Cal press release on NewsBlaze LLC:
The 9th annual Global Social Venture Competition at the University of California’s Haas School of Business. Ten business school teams from the United States, Indonesia, Taiwan and France will present their plans for businesses with both a financial and a social or environmental bottom line.
The finalists’ business ideas range from microbial fuel cells and safe syringes to socially responsible outsourcing to Africa. Plan summaries are online at:
http://socialvc.net/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.viewpage&pageid=237. The business plan presentations are open to the public.
The 2008 Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship will cap off the competition.
It will feature keynote addresses and panels as well as the announcement of and presentation by the competition’s Social Impact Assessment Prize winner, chosen from one of this year’s finalist teams.
- Global Social Venture Competition
WHEN: 8:45 a.m. to 3:45 p.m., Friday, April 18
WHERE: Wells Fargo Room, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. A map is online at: http://www.berkeley.edu/map.
- 2008 Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship (registration required)
WHEN:
9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday April 19
WHERE:
UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center. A map and directions are online at: http://www.ahl-missionbay.com/directions.cfm.
WHO:
Pamela Hartigan, founding partner of Volans Ventures and founding managing director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and Jason Green, general partner of Emergence Capital Partners, among others.
BACKGROUND:
The competition was founded by five Berkeley MBA students at the Haas School of Business in 1999 and has since then grown into an international partnership between the Haas School, Columbia Business School, London Business School, Indian School of Business and Yale School of Management.
Thammasat University in Thailand, ESSEC Business School in France, the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and a consortium of business schools in South Korea called Social Venture Competition Korea provided additional support by soliciting MBA teams from their respective international regions.
The Global Social Venture Competition is the largest and oldest student-led business plan competition providing mentorship, exposure and financial awards to emerging social ventures from around the world.
For more information, go to http://www.gsvc.org or http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/responsiblebusiness/2008GSVCSymposium.htm.
No commentsWorld Clock: a dashboard for the Planet
Susan Sanderman of Denver just forwarded this fascinating World Clock that shows the current status of major global health, environmental and social statistics, updated in real time. It’s like an impact dashboard for the Planet!
This kind of ‘impact context’ should be a touchstone for any impact analysis– if focused down to the region where a company or organization does its work, it makes a great starting point for what the “addressable market” is in terms of any of these social or environmental issues. Working to prevent biodiversity loss? Malaria? Drowning? Use your impact analysis to say not just, we’re preventing X instances, but also, “Here’s how much our solution will slow it from the current rate of loss.” That makes it MUCH more meaningful.
World Clock’s makers compiled it from highly credible sources of statistical datasets, but they have not verified any of it and it may be spotty in parts, so it would be worth verifying if you use it.
Impact Credit Ratings?
Flaws in the way credit risk is assessed have played a critical role in the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown. At the same time, SVT is seeing increasing calls for ratings of risk in the emerging social capital markets: not just ratings of credit or financial risk, but also ratings of the likelihood of a certain social or environmental outcome. For example, this topic has come up in conversations about how to address the problems of cost and access in health care, where a need is being defined for not only better ratings of patients’ “credit risk” in the sense of their ability to pay so that healthcare providers might price services more affordably to a given individual and thus have a greater likelihood of receiving payment (nonpayment being a billion dollar problem for both healthcare providers and patients), but also for ratings of patients’ “health risk,” in terms of how individuals manage aspects of their health over which they have influence. The latter is analogous to an individual’s credit score, except here the score would be related to how well one had managed one’s health factors.
Another illustration is in the impact investing space, where there is both a desire to be able to gauge both what novel risks to financial return may exist in investment opportunities that have a social or environmental spin to them, and a desire to gauge in a simple, low-cost way the degree to which a given investment opportunity counts as a “positive impact” investment.
The key question is, how should health risk, or impact, or impact “risk,” be assessed? And, if it were, how would we know this was a good measure? What if it was flawed- would individuals who’d gotten a low “health credit score” be able to appeal? If so, to whom? Would companies who fill out ratings surveys to gauge their sustainability be held accountable for the accuracy of their self-reported data? By whom?
I like swishing around in this murky territory…. But no matter how unclear the answers are, one thing is certain. the fact that these conversations are taking place and experimental solutions are being piloted means the social capital marketplace is maturing into a full-fledged market.
Best source for carbon calculators
Our friend Paul Herman sent this fabulous Squidoo list of 71 (and counting) Carbon Calculators, which Natural Logic’s Dave Jaber and Mike Wallace of Wallace Partners stocked. You can rate your favorite! Great place to start figuring out your contribution to global warming and how to minimize and offset it.
No commentsWicked Problem SROI Analysis
Human rights abuse issues are complex, nonlinear and ever-changing problems; the problem definition derives from solution strategy; the key stakeholder groups have radically different world views and frames of the problem, and often the problem can only be “solved” by group effort. All of these characteristics describe what sociologist Horst Rittel (1973) called “wicked problems.” You know what some are: terrorism, poverty, peace in the Middle East… along with many of the human rights issues two great human rights organizations, Ella Baker Center (EBC) and WITNESS, work to change.
We were hired to work with these two partners to develop an analysis of the social returns attributable specifically to System Failure– a wicked problem challenge. So we used a wicked problem solution strategy to define an approach. We had to capture the different stakeholders observations about what change had taken place and what caused it. The key impact question was, “What impacts are because of the specific event, organization, or specific aspect of the campaign?”
To determine this three types of information are needed from stakeholders.
1. Information about Magnitude
How big was the change?
How difficult was it to effect?
2. Information about Linkage
How did the film play a role?
How much did the film have to do with causing the change?
3. Information about Confidence
How sure are we that our rating of the linkage between the film and the change is accurate?
Our approach to SROI Analysis for Wicked Problems is summarized in this pdf (scroll down to the section called “also available from SVT”). Have you grappled with measurement of change in a wicked problem situation? How did you do it?