In his book Off the Books: the Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh describes the complicated role street gang plays in the everyday life and economics of an impoverished Chicago neighborhood. Venkatesh explains that the gang at its core is a money making operation, and that violence is a negative externally, rather than an end in itself, [...]
Yesterday Sean Stannard-Stockton put up an excellent post titled Getting Results: Outputs, Outcomes, and Impact explaining the difference between outputs, outcomes, and impact. Looking at each type of indicator separately, Sean writes: Outputs: These are the activities done by the nonprofit. The meals served by a soup kitchen are outputs. Outcomes: These are the observed effects [...]
The collapse of the U.S. economy, and subsequent bailout of the financial sector has brought the phrase “too big to fail” into the collective social conscience. The argument goes that the economy should not be so dependent on any one company that without it, everything falls apart. It seems fairly clear in hindsight why making [...]
Few topics in the social sector are as ludicrous as the allegedly excessive compensation of non-profit executives. Not only is it a comical thought that anyone truly wanting to enrich themselves would go into the poverty business, it is painfully beside the point. The debate over nonprofit executive compensation has little to do with increasing social [...]
What ever happened to thinking big? In the social sector, thinking small, micro to be exact, is all the rage, and perhaps with some reason. The blunt force of macro interventions like clumsy development aid have drawn the intense scrutiny of people like Bill Easterly. Failing the success of sweeping interventions, the sector has recently [...]
It is no secret I believe evaluations need to be a central part of the work we do in the social sector, and that not all evaluative frameworks are created equal. Certainly establishing a reliable system for measuring organizational impact eludes us, but even in the cases that we do have reliable outcomes metrics, I [...]
We have an evaluation problem in the social sector. We want evaluations to be easy more than we want them to be right. Designing good surveys and collecting client data is hard. Rating how we feel about a particular program on a scale from one to five is easy. As a sector, we need to [...]
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