And the list goes on…..

Two more organizations to add to the list: The Microfinance Rating and Assessment Initiative by M-CRIL, MicroFinanza Rating, MicroRate, and Planet Rating Razoo And here’s the rest of the list, so far: FasterCures Philanthropy Advisory Service (I’m an advisor to this effort) SocialCapital Index (Managers are email colleagues of mine) Alliance for Social Investing (I [...]

Information markets in philanthropy

Tim O’Reilly notes the following great examples of innovators around “transparency in government” and recommends they consider joining the incoming Presidential administration. “I’m thinking of folks behind initiatives like the Sunlight Foundation, or Everyblock, or public.resource.org. Heck, I’d even reach out to the geniuses behind mysociety.org in the UK.” Is there a parallel list of [...]

The medium makes the matter matter

Two follow ups from earlier posts this week: 1) Yesterday I wrote this post on the Harvard Business Review article by Bradach, Tierney, and Stone, “Delivering on the Promise of Nonprofits,” HBR, December 2008, pp 88 – 97. I’ve been deluged with emails saying that the points about overhead are obvious and have been made [...]

Networks, metrics, levers, buzzwords

I’m nearing the end of my second to last multi-week road trip of 2008. Way too much travel… Need to go home… Can not think, let alone write, anymore… What follows are notes. Way back in May I wrote about a paper on Working Wikily from the Packard Foundation. To their credit, they’ve built out [...]

Networks, metrics, levers, buzzwords

I’m nearing the end of my second to last multi-week road trip of 2008. Way too much travel… Need to go home… Can not think, let alone write, anymore… What follows are notes. Way back in May I wrote about a paper on Working Wikily from the Packard Foundation. To their credit, they’ve built out [...]

Measuring failure

Two topics of frequent discussion in philanthropy – metrics and innovation – just came together in an interview I heard while listening to the radio. Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace spoke with A.G. Lafley, CEO of Proctor & Gamble and author of a book on innovation, The Game-Changer. You can read the transcript of the interview [...]

Considering measurements and measurers

Who are you? How do you know? Psychologists love questions of identity and all its multiple dimensions – from attitudes to behavior. Geneticists are also ready to weigh in, from different perspectives and with different data. Demographers will chime in – disaggregating you along various dimensions and then adding you into many cohorts. Historians or [...]

Where does the money go?

Today’s Wall Street Journal asks this question, in this article by Sally Beatty (subscription required). I sit on the advisory board of the Nonprofit Reporter, one of the organizations interviewed and mentioned in the story. Today Marketplace, NPR’s daily business program, begins a week long series on philanthropy. The opening segment looks at embedded giving, [...]

More about counting

My earlier post about the abundance of giving indices – and the inability to find correlations among them – sparked a bit of interest. One comment included a pitch for increasing giving by linking it to shopping and or internet searching- something offered by all kinds of retailers (see the (RED) campaign for one of [...]

Success isn’t always in the metrics

If you think its touch to develop indicators of success for a philanthropic grant program, try measuring national happiness. Check out this post from the NewEconomist, which cites an economist’s study of the ten indicators of “happy capitalism.” They are: 1. High degree of trust in fellow citizens2. Low amount of corruption3. Low unemployment4. High [...]