Understanding SDG 11 Indicators for Sustainable Cities and Communities   By the year 2050, nearly 70% of the global population is expected to live in urban areas. That fact alone should be enough to e...

Congratulations SOCAP for ten years of capital advancing investment to generate community level impacts! At SOCAP every year there is a palpable excitement that goes pretty much unabated until the fin...

The climate philanthropy is one of many global mechanisms to fund climate change solutions more rapidly and effectively. And yet, historically, it is estimated that only about 2% of global philanthrop...

If you search Google for family foundation impact investing one of the first results you’ll get is a link to the Russell Family Foundation web page. And for good reason. This foundation took a big ris...

Financing the Sustainable Development Goals to achieve all the SDG targets is an international endeavor of huge scale. Some estimate that scale to be $6 trillion annually in order to reach those lofty...

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are ostensibly a vision. They’re a shared framework for a path to a better world. But who are they for? Development organizations, non-profits, other social...

The best impact investing funds offer the socially-conscious investor an actionable way to create an impact with their investments, alongside financial returns. In this article, we'll take a look at h...

In the world of microfinance there are social returns to be accounted for, in addition to financial accountability. Implementing a social performance framework to conduct such accountability assessmen...

The Global Reporting Initiative has been around for decades. It is widely used, but perhaps still not enough.

You might think that foundations allocate a considerable amount of their capital towards mission-related investing. You wouldn’t be rash for thinking this, but you would still be wrong. In this articl...

How might we engage Millennials as an employee, investor, asset owner, contributor, or beneficiary? The Millennial engagement question pesters leaders at the C-suite levels of businesses around the wo...

Superficial impact metrics  or simply copying and pasting IRIS metrics over your activities might be cost effective and make you feel good about the “impact” you seem to be generating.

The impact space is inundated with impact reports. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Donors and impact investors need to see such impact reports to be updated about progress year after year about t...

In Part I of this blog series we looked at the Social Return on Investment (SROI) approach to accounting for impact and some of the challenges involved in its implementation. In this blog, we'll share...

A lot of people try to get to a number for SROI Ratio and it misses the truth. The point of SROI calculation isn’t necessarily to justify capital investment, it’s to understand value creation through ...

A wave of social enterprise excitement has taken hold across the globe. The power of social entrepreneurship to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges has led to an explosion of interest in the d...

According to a survey by the Global Impact Investing Network, more than $100 billion worth of impact investing assets are currently under management. Every dollar of that investment capital represents...

Like any other storytelling, Impact Storytelling is also an art. In your social impact report how do you mix qualitative data with quantitative data? And tell a story which not only communicates inten...

It is the question on many impact manager's mind, how to build effective nonprofit impact reports? An effective social impact report focuses on a collective process that aligns impact thesis (ie. Theo...

In the United States, more than $1.2 Billion is spent just building nonprofit impact reports. And that doesn't include the time spent doing inefficient data gathering across disparate systems of data ...

  The definition of collective social impact dramatically differs based on the role we are referencing, e.g., impact investor, foundation, government, funding agency, program agency or practitioner. I...

      Social sector organizations have been notorious about building custom solutions for managing their internal data (except for fundraising products). This includes data for programs, clients & oth...

Like a business, nonprofits can also use Salesforce to streamline workflows, benefitting both internal and external stakeholders alike. Nonprofits effectively using Salesforce manage donation cycles, ...

This week in San Francisco @SOCAP 10th Anniversary I had the opportunity to talk to social impact thinkers, practitioners, and leaders. While many impact investors are navigating different taxonomy an...

  Outcome metrics or Impact Metrics are, put simply, results. The measurement of outcomes illustrates the kind of impact that programs have had on communities served. In this brief blog, we'll define ...

In recent years, businesses across all sectors have demonstrated concern about acquiring the right technology to solve their impact data management challenges, particularly when it comes to data aggre...

 There’s no "One Kind" of foundation or Impact Investor and the variations boil down to lots of factors including their Vision statements. Today let's talk about two types of investors :

Lean Data, a term popularized by Acumen, refers to collecting high quality data related to social impact in order to demonstrate social change, and to do so with extremely efficient use of resources. ...

Social impact measurement is complicated. Sometimes it feels like a tangled mess of data, indicators, spreadsheets, and numbers that nobody believes. It doesn’t need to be that way. Not if we build up...

What are impact metrics standards? I like to think of each metrics standard as its own 'language.' Standards help us speak the same language as others in our network (i.e. stakeholders) so that we und...