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...

"I am a creative" - not a phrase I expected to declare at a conference - especially not at the top of my lungs. However, that's exactly what I did alongside a crowd of fellow creatives at the 5th annu...

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...

In the United States alone foundation grants and giving account for nearly $70 billion annually. That fact implies that a whole lot of impact is being generated. But how would we know? Managing grant ...

At SOCAP 2018, people from all over the world will be descending upon Fort Mason Center in San Francisco to connect and to be inspired to continue mobilizing capital for the greater good.

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 biggest event of the year in the impact investing sector is about to take place in San Francisco. Every Fall, Social Capital Markets, or SOCAP, brings together social entrepreneurs, investors, com...

It’s no secret that social entrepreneurs are out to change the world. Telling the world that’s what you’re doing and how you’re doing it isn’t so easy.

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.

"It was great to see how the Impact Cloud™  software uses language I'm familiar with. This made it easier for us to use compared to other systems." Nancy Metzger, Executive Director of Working Capital...

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.

Two years ago, NextBillion.net published Building a Collaborative Social Impact Measurement Operating System. The article concluded that unless we make the process of collecting, sharing and analyzing...

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...

Key Players: Program Director, Learning & Evaluation Director, Program Analysts, Evaluator and IT Director & Team

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...

[Author's of this report are well-known social impact thinkers and professors, who have collaborated with SoPact on four part Actionable Impact Management series.  We are republishing with their permi...

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...