New ways to measure and evaluate the impact an organization’s work has on society (more)
Voluntary carbon offsets allow people to invest in projects that allegedly counteract their greenhouse gas emissions. But can voluntary offsets help slow global warming? Or are offsets a way for consumers to buy their way out of bad feelings?
Research shows that men may be more effective than woman at utilizing microfinance investments.
Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy by Paul Brest and Hal Harvey
The Lodestar Foundation supports nonprofit collaborations, mergers, and other cooperative activities as a major strategy.
How does an organization get through the evaluation process and live to tell about it? In this panel, part of the Stanford Social Innovation Review's conference on evaluation, funders and fundees on both sides of the table from a variety of organizations in the areas of education and social services talk about what it was like to be in the trenches of successful evaluation processes. They tease out common success factors, including how to work collaboratively across sectors and with multiple constituents.
Serving more than 110 million people per year, BRAC is the largest nonprofit in the world. Yet it doesn't receive the most charitable donations. Instead, BRAC's social enterprises generate 80 percent of the organization's annual budget. These revenues have allowed the organization to develop, test, and replicate some of the world's most innovative antipoverty programs.
A new evaluation tool allows donors and investors to track their investments and compare their data to those of organizations doing similar work.
Nonprofits tend to collect a great deal of evaluative data but often have no idea how to use it to assess their performance—particularly because doing so properly is a complicated process requiring serious social sciences knowledge. In this panel discussion, part of the Stanford Social Innovation Review's conference on evaluation, two experts talk about how an organization may better use such data—as well as "external" information in the form of theory and advice—to create a "culture of inquiry" focused on learning and improvement.
