Featuring Steve Wright from the Salesforce.com Foundation

categories: Ideas, Impact Assessment and Measurement

Published July 14, 2009 @ 09:21AM PT

A couple months ago, we featured a guest post by Steve Wright, Director of Innovation at the Salesforce.com Foundation. The post, "Reimagining Value for the Post Crisis Economy," became one of our most popular ever, garnishing nearly forty comments from social entrepreneurship luminaries across the space.

About a month ago, I invited Steve to follow up that stellar piece with something focused more directly on his particular passion for social impact data. As the Director of Innovation at the Salesforce.com Foundation, Steve has had the chance to work with some innovative projects around improving the way we collect and use data to determine our social impact, such as the Acumen Fund initiated PULSE Project.

Steve's new piece, "A Brave New World of Social Impact Data," is an incredibly important rumination on how to better use data to understand and increase our impact. The key graph for me:

As I see it, markets represent the physics of social change. Understanding their rules is critical to approximating an empirical understanding of social impact. At the moment, in the social sector, we operate in two disparate, conflicting marketplaces. The first is characterized by transactions and competition and the second by ideas and collaboration. It is my belief that we need to find synergies between these two markets if we are to create lasting global solutions. To a large extent, in the same way that an individual organization focuses on the change that it can make, the role of the market place is to focus on the change that can be made globally by leveraging the strengths and weaknesses of the network as a whole, both the nodes and the connections between them.

Yesterday we had some technical, and the post was published in incomplete form and under my byline, but we've corrected that now, and you can read the complete work here: "A Brave New World of Social Impact Data."

Check out Steve's older piece, "Reimagining Value For A Post-Crisis Economy," as well.

Steve is one of the many incredible speakers featured at the upcoming Social Capital Markets conference, being held in San Francisco at the beginning of September. In it's second year, SoCap convenes innovators across the blended value space and works to demonstrate the ecosystem emerging around good capital. Check out their full schedule here.

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Comments (1)

Hi Steve, Many thanks for this terrifically thoughtful, timely and galvanizing post. For those of us in the community development arena striving to develop rigorous social outcome data in a bottom up, participatory way, your words ring especially true. In response to both Wyva’s and Scott’s comments, our program – Success Measures at NeighborWorks America (www.nw.org/network/ps/successmeasures) -- should be of particular interest. For the past ten years, in an effort driven by practitioners, in collaboration with funders and resident stakeholders, we’ve been able to develop and deploy a robust menu of common indicators and data collection tools to measure relevant community development outcomes including: changes in people’s savings and asset accumulation behavior; capacity for collective action resulting from organizing and mobilizing local residents; the economic impact of commercial revitalization activities; improvements in the quality of life in underserved communities. Through a combination of training, technical assistance and access to our web-based data system, nearly 200 community-based organizations have been able to incorporate outcome evaluation into their ongoing work. Our colleagues and community partners continue to be deeply engaged and invested in this process, aggregating and sharing data and using evaluation results to craft narratives that depict social change in realistic and compelling ways. As a facilitator of their efforts in measuring hard-to-measure social change, we are awed by these organizations, large and small, and the extent to which they embrace serious outcome measurement and make it a very real part of their way of doing business.

Posted by Debby Visser on 08/04/2009 @ 02:10PM PT
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Nathaniel is the founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University, which works annually with hundreds of students in dozens of countries around the world through curricular programs and student project incubation.