In considering the effectiveness of your social enterprise, are you making a difference? Do you add value to your constituents' lives? Are you as effective as possible per dollar output? In this panel discussion at the 2008 Skoll World Forum, talented experts talk about the challenges of social enterprises and how metrics can impact organizational learning and innovation, and lead the more effective use of resources.
Evaluation is one of the most powerful mechanisms a nonprofit organization can use to unlock its potential, become more effective, and achieve success. But traditional evaluation methods are expensive, require thorough knowledge of the social sciences, and take a good deal of time to perform. In this part of the Stanford Social Innovation Review's conference on evaluation, Mark Kramer details how nonprofits can better incorporate evaluation to achieve their mission and bring about social change.
Teach For America places thousands of energetic and committed college graduates as teachers in under-resourced schools for their first jobs. In this audio lecture recorded at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Wendy Kopp shares why and how she started Teach for America in 1980, and its progress in raising the bar for under-achieving children. She also discusses how the organization rode out its "dark years," when enthusiasm and corporate support for the effort began to wane.
To share its expertise without jeopardizing its mission, FareStart spun out a new organization.
Having an elderly parent with failing health and being unable to provide adequate care out of one's home poses a difficult enough challenge in the United States, let alone in Cairo, Egypt, where home services are scarce. In this audio interview with host Sheela Sethuraman, Magda Iskander describes how she founded Care With Love to fill the need in Cairo for short or long term home healthcare through well-trained and compassionate home health care providers.
Funders are calling for more program evaluation, but nonprofits are often collecting dubious data, at great cost to themselves and ultimately to the people they serve.
Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, not the isolated intervention of individual organizations.
For NGOs, impact comes in different forms and to track the cycles of social change work, we must think across the tangibility and the speed of emergence of change.
With an understanding of these 10 funding models, nonprofit leaders can use the for-profit world's valuable practice of engaging in succinct and clear conversations about long-term financial strategy.
Fair Trade-certified coffee is growing in sales, but strict certification requirements are resulting in uneven economic advantages for coffee growers and lower quality coffee for consumers.
