Mirror, Mirror on the wall, what's the impact of this all?

Measuring impact/assessment/evaluation were popular points of discussion at most of the sessions that I attended. This session discussed tensions surrounding the measurement of social impact with organizations both at the forefront of developing evaluation theory and those people on-the-ground implementing social programs. This interactive panel discussion explored various approaches to assessing impact and leveraging these efforts to attract resources and drive organisational learning. The panellists were:

• Jeroo Billimoria, Executive Director, Aflatoun, Child savings International She has been an Ashoka fellow and founded the highly successful Childline in Mumbai, which now operates in 74 large cities in India. She is on to her third social venture which provides children with financial education, while teaching them about their responsibilities and rights as citizens.
• David Bonbright, Chief Executive, Keystone Accountability. He has extensive experience in international development as a grant maker for institutions like the Ford Foundation and the Aga Khan Foundation and as an innovator in civil society strengthening. He is a regular contributor to the Alliance Magazine.
• Joe Madiath, Executive Director, Gram Vikas. In 1971 he led 400 volunteers to manage a number of relief camps for refugees from Bangladesh. Later that year 40 volunteers, along with Joe moved to Orissa which had bee ravaged by a cyclone. they decided to stay on in the area to work as development activists. In 1979 Gram Vikas was established. Gram Vikas works with 36.000 indigenous and poor families living in 560 rural habitations.
• Brian Trestald, Chief Investment Officer, Acumen Fund - a social investment fund with $27 million in approved investments in businesses that provide health, water, housing and energy good and services to the poor. the fund that is know for its record in tracking financial and social metrics.
• Faye Twerskey, Director, Impact Planning and Improvement at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is an internal department that serves as a consultancy on strategy, measurement and learning to all 3 of the foundations programme areas - Global Health, Global Development and US Programme.
• Roger L. Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto acted as facilitator.

Each panellist gave a their approach and experience of assessing impact and their experience of measuring it.

• Joe Madiath gave some dire statistics of the inequity for the girl child in rural India, the state of the sanitary infrastructure . He said if these statistics change, there was evidence of impact.
• Jerro Billamoria spoke about he investment in children and the complexity of measurement and who needs to be involved in measuring. She was interested in how one gets "systems change".
• Brian Trestald said the Acumen Fund measured evidence and said the "social capital market does exist and the market is a good listening device. David Benbright spoke about the complexity of measuring some impact.
• Faye Twersky from the Gates Foundation advocated that evaluation should be aligned with the organization’s overall strategy – for example, measuring customer demand in market-based models or measuring improved access to water for development projects. And no matter what model you follow, if it’s not going to be helpful for your programming and learning then there’s no need to be spending time and energy gathering the data.

Much of this conversation always comes back to defining one's vision of success. In a standard business model, looking at sales and revenues and net profit make measuring success is an easy target. However, in the complex world of social entrepreneurship, the metrics become harder to define. This session unfortunately did not offer any concrete solutions , but it continued to raise the critical issue of using evaluation as a learning tool to improve the performance of the enterprise.

Mirror, Mirror on the wall, what's the impact of this all?- 1 hour 52 min (Real Player required)

Resources

- Social Edge blog Mirror Mirror on the Wall, What's the IMPACT of this all?