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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.

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?

Michael Edesess, Boardmember of International Development Enterprises (IDE), reports that “The Economist magazine has a highly favorable review this week of my friend and colleague Paul Polak’s book ‘Out of Poverty.’…The book describes the methods that Paul and International Development Enterprises (IDE), the organization he founded, use to help the poorest people in the developing world earn more income.” I’m delighted to see it’s for sale on Amazon, rather than only found on a foundation’s site!
IDE received a $13M grant about a year ago from the Gates Foundation to scale its work, which has allowed Paul, now 74, the time to write. It’s excellent to see a person with so much to teach have the time and opportunity to write up and disseminate his knowledge! I wish so many other social entrepreneurs with great wisdom had the time and resources to document their work. If I were a philanthropist I’d invest in such a library of books– this amazing moment in the transformation of the capital markets should not be lost to history.

For example I’d love to see Martin Fisher of Kickstart, which has been pursuing similar goals with excellence, do a book with Paul where they share and perhaps debate what the both have learned over decades about the nuances and issues of delivering sustainable tools to solve poverty; or Pati Ruiz Corzo of Sierra Gorda and Albina Ruiz of Ciudad Saludable document and debate the differences between their approaches to engaging community members in economically and culturally sustainable protection and restoration of ecosystems. I’m talking about the nitty gritty- how does this stuff really work and what are the hard-won entrepreneurial lessons for people working in the trenches.
Fortunately John Elkington (SustainAbility) and Pamela Hartigan (Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship) have also just written The Power of Unreasonable People capturing some of these lessons learned, but although I have only yet read the book jacket I suspect they’ve gone light on the nitty gritty of their own trench stories, which I think would be fascinating and useful to know– but perhaps I better read it and find out!

Right now I’m working on the social return on investment analysis of WITNESS’s campaign to reform the California Juvenile Justice System. The Schwab Foundation has put up funds to support small-scale Social Return on Investment Analyses (see the Framework paper, not yet loaded) for five enterprises and a workshop on SROI in January at their annual Summit preceding the World Economic Forum. How do you systematically capture and track the value created by a human rights video campaign?

I just put in their 22-minute 2001 video, Books Not Bars, the first of two they’ve helped produce and disseminate to catalyze movement. I expected to be impressed with the quality of the video, and probably to feel anger about the injustice they’re trying to expose, maybe some guilt or shame. The surprise was that about 15 minutes into it I started crying.

I’m wondering if this is related to sleep deprivation? I was out late and drank a lot…. or maybe hormones? It’s Sunday so I’m here in the office alone and free to overtly feel. I’m already feeling wired and anxious, ok, I admit it, intimidated– I really want Gillian and the others to think my analysis is worthwhile, and time is short and I’m doing it mostly by myself.

…maybe some of the faces remind me of the kids I taught and worked with in Chicago, or the 15-year old, sweet, black father whose purple crayon portrait I drew and gave to him in the all-volunteer education program at the juvenile detention center in Greenville, Misssissippi in 1994. It’s bringing back the raw feelings for those 2 years in the Delta and the years afterwards doing social work in Chicago: the overwhelming disillusionment about my country and about people in general when I realized how whole generations of people were systematically shut out and everybody could see it and they just went about their lives, that protracted grief and outrage combined with an extreme case of the twentysomething fear/angst that comes with the passage from college into real life when you’re ejected into a vaccuum without any context at all for the first time in your life.

It was because of that experience that I became a social entrepreneur. And it was because you can’t get enough d–n money to fund the work even when you’re doing the most truly necessary work there is that I became obsessed with how you measure non-financial value in a way the capital markets can use. So here I am, diving into this analysis in hopes it is somewhat additive to the smart metrics Gillian and her team have already, and in hopes I can help paint a convincing picture for her and the other Schwabbies that if enough social entrepreneurs use the same process for assessing and reporting their social value, the capital markets will move differently.

The stats are a thin extraction from the video that I can put into words: the US is the world’s largest jailer… 1/4 of the world’s prisoners are in America… 1 in 10 black men here are in jail… a black kid is 48X more likely than a white kid to do time when arrested on a drug-related charge… 3 in 5 kids will become reinvolved in the system after their release. Spending on prisons up 800 percent in the past 20 years- a pretty frigging great IRR for somebody and a pretty crap one for a whole bunch of others. How does that compare to other US industries?

Now on to the job at hand: an experimental, systematic valuation of the role WITNESS’s video has actually played in this human rights campaign. Empirical evidence of impact item #1: 15 minutes to tears.