SVT Group's blog

Few terms evoke such a passionate response in the impact management field as “social return on investment” or “SROI". It’s not so much the idea itself that sparks debate, but the varying interpretations of how the term should be translated into practice. Read more...

Imagine a big, 3-dimensional, digital globe, on which any nonprofit or business in the world could map its operations worldwide. Each company’s shareholders, or the company itself, could enter data estimating how much money the company is investing and where it’s being spent. Read more...

This week Brett is in London at an event our friends at New Philanthropy Capital have put on to launch a new Association of Nonprofit Impact Analysts. The aim is to build excitement around the notion that impact analysis is a discipline that can have much more powerful benefits if it gets organized.

NPC says “the proposed Association of Nonprofit Analysts would have several aims:
* To be a peer group, providing a forum for sharing and learning; Read more...

Meetings. Conferences. Dinners. Gatherings. Scheduling. Airlines. Hotels. Expenses. Such is life on the road.

Why do we do this? What draws us to go far out of our way to convene face to face? Is it the thrill of travel? The exotic locations? Meeting friends and colleagues in person? The ease of brainstorming in real time? Probably all of the above. They are key elements of convening great minds to address a challenge and at least in part, why we continue to do it. Read more...

In a time when economies are failing and funding is tight, it’s hard to imagine that any investor would put funds into an organization that can promise little more than an attempt to meet a set of guiding principles. But they do. Repeatedly.

Imagine you went into a restaurant and rather than a menu, you were handed only a culinary Code of Conduct.

For your contribution of $10, we declare our intention to*:

1) Hire employees from the area surrounding the restaurant
2) Buy ingredients from a reputable supplier
3) Cook them into something we hope you will enjoy Read more...

Master’s degrees in business administration (MBAs) are expensive. Only a small percentage of people worldwide can afford them, and many graduates are saddled with debt that makes straying from the conventional corporate path difficult once they earn the degree. As corporations begin to take real steps toward sustainability, more opportunities exist for those who want to combine business careers with social justice and a net neutral impact on the planet’s ecosystem, but it is still outside of corporate life where the heart of social entrepreneurship beats. Read more...

New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) and Bertelsmann Stiftung will be hosting a conference in London this May, to discuss the subject of nonprofit analysis. It is an event for anyone who is interested in assessing charities and other nonprofits, and looking at their effectiveness.

The conference aims to create excitement and energy around the analysis of nonprofits as a discipline. We hope that it will give rise to a network of individuals from all over the world who will become the core of a new association. Read more...

The UC Berkeley Center for Executive Education and the UC Berkeley Center for Responsible Business will host a Corporate Responsiblity Leadership Program May 14-15, 2009. The program will provide two days of interactive instruction designed to strengthen senior executives’ efforts to integrate corporate responsibility into their business strategy. Read more...

Arul Velan and Dinesh Thirupuvanam, founders of San Francisco start-up Viv, have a bright idea – give businesses a simple way to go green while driving sales and profits. Viv is founded on two principles: 1) Small changes add up and 2) Give consumers the power to do good without going too far out of their way, and they will. Read more...

I am in Bangkok this week spending time at one of Southeast Asia’s premier MBA programs, Thammasat University, to participate in the judging event of the Global Social Venture Competition South East Asia Semifinals, and a question that hovers much of the time in the back of my mind has come to the fore. Social capitalists and entrepreneurs may in some cases be born, but where do you go if you want to learn the science of social investing or impact management? Read more...