A panel entitled "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, What's the IMPACT of this all?" delivered at this year's Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship explored new approaches to assessing the impact of our work. The panel, formed by social investors and entrepreneurs - including Fay Twersky, Director for Impact Planning and Improvement of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Brian Trestald, Chief Investment Officer of the Acumen Fund and Keystone's Chief Executive, David Bonbright - examined the challenges of impact assessment for social enterprises, from time constraints faced by social entrepreneurs on the ground to the conciliation of different approaches to measuring and the choice of what to measure. Panelists presented new trends in thinking about evaluation and impact assessment and agreed that it is only worth pursuing if aimed at learning and improving our work.

 Two new articles on the Financial Times touch two of the issues that are explored in the recently published Keystone study ‘Online Philanthropy Markets: From Feel-Good Giving to Effective Social Investing?’: the array of opportunities that the online world offers for transforming the way we engage in philanthropic activities and the challenge of giving both with our hearts and heads.

Sarah Murray, in a piece titled: ‘The age of cyberspace offers aids for giving’, reviews the rising phenomenon of online giving and the opportunities that it presents for revolutionizing philanthropy. The article identifies that beyond offering a means for making donations easily, online philanthropy platforms enable knowledge exchange among different actors that facilitates ‘a more “open source” approach to finding solutions to seemingly intractable problems’. In addition, they come with ‘built-in’ accountability and transparency elements, such as direct reports on the use of funds and progress achieved from beneficiary organizations or individuals. And the innovation goes on to enabling direct involvement by users, with systems that are based on user-generated content or crowd-sourcing for identifying successful solutions to social problems.

 An inspiring article appeared in December in the New Yorker magazine: a doctor in the United S tates introduced step-by-step checklists for procedures in intensive care units and gave the power to nurses to control doctors' performance against the checklists. The results? In some cases, infection rates in ICUs dropped by 66%. The author wonders: If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do? 

Simple ideas often have the greatest impact. At Keystone we believe that simple interventions for enabling the voice of beneficiaries and other constituents of developmental processes enhance the  performance and impact that  organisations working in the social change field are having. Who better to control and assess the work of these organisations, than those most affected by it? For this, we have developed a series of tools and services that give beneficiaries and other constituents genuine voice within the organisations that act on their behalf and for their benefit. 

The second volume of the CIVICUS Global Survey of the State of Civil Society offers a wide-ranging analysis of key issues facing civil society worldwide with contributions from prominent researchers and civil society practitioners. Comprising 24 chapters, the book draws on the information collected by the CIVICUS Civil Society Index project in more than 45 countries to explore issues such as civil society’s accountability, its relations to the state and corporate sector and its role in governance and development. It also includes regional overviews of the state of civil society in different continents. By bringing together a diversity of perspectives and themes, this book offers one of the most comprehensive and engaging analyses of civil society worldwide.

This month sees the first posts to the new Charitable Measurement Initiative blog.  Created by Harsh Trivedi and Alexander Lemke, CMI is passionate about maximizing the impact of non-profit organizations by increasing their transparency and facilitating public reporting.  To achieve their goals, CMI has implemented the Keystone framework.  Stay up to date with their progress through updates on their blog.

“The Business Guide to partnering with NGOs and the United Nations" was presented at the Global Compact's Leaders Summit in Geneva on July 5.
 
Keystone’s Chief Executive David Bonbright served as a member of the board of advisors and co-authored the introduction to the Guide, along with Henrik Skovby, Founding Partner of Dalberg Global Development Advisors and Robert H. Dunn, President and CEO of the Synergos Institute. The essay, entitled "The Spirit Behind the Business Guide", commented that "in today’s globalised world, companies need to make a profit and be responsible corporate citizens, but it is difficult to know who to partner with and how. This guide will help companies match their skills and contributions to organizations looking to build successful public private partnerships".
 
The “Business Guide to Partnering with NGOs and the United Nations” is the first ever global effort to apply a business partnership lens to rate NGOs and UN agencies. The Guide provides a market-based assessment of the competencies of partners from the NGO and UN communities. Social actors are rated and profiled on the basis of their accountability, adaptability, execution and communication.
 
The “Business Guide to Partnering with NGOs and the United Nations” can be purchased from: http://www.dalberg.com/guide/ 

All non-profit organisations, regardless of size, can benefit from publishing reviews of their performance in stakeholder reports, according to AccountAbility.

The London-based standards developer and think tank has just issued its own report to stakeholders for 2004-2005 following extensive consultation with its stakeholders on how they think the organisation is performing.

The report – known as The AccountAbility Accounts – assesses whether the organisation has delivered against its stated strategic and operational objectives.

The Who Counts? campaign encourages financial reporting to beneficiaries as a driver of NGOs' impact. Using this information beneficiaries can make sure that funds are spent on their real priorities.

The Who Counts? campaign message continues to spread in the NGO sector and people are signing up via the website. You are in the best place to keep talking about financial reporting to beneficiaries in your organisation and network. Please point people to the campaign website and ask them to sign up at

"Social Entrepreneurship has brought a new vision to the field of philanthropy and, with it, a different perspective on evaluation. In fact, many familiar approaches to evaluation in philanthropy miss the key criteria that funders consider essential to success within the field of Social Entrepreneurship.

Within this young field, funders have invented their own ways of assessing performance, often independently of parallel efforts by their colleagues. As a result, a review of prevailing practices elicits different but overlapping solutions to a common set of problems.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the various approaches to evaluation in Social Entrepreneurship today, documenting the practices currently in use so that new entrants to this emerging field will not need to reinvent the tools already developed by its pioneers. At times, these newer ways of thinking seem better suited to the messy realities of social change than some of the more familiar approaches currently used in philanthropy. Conversely, the pragmatic approach to evaluation within the field of Social Entrepreneurship sometimes lacks the discipline and reliability of more wellestablished approaches.

The International Center for Not- for-Profit Law (ICNL) has produced for USAID this report summarizing the major findings of its research into accreditation andcertification programs.

The project considered:

• existing efforts to develop organizational accreditation/ certification programs throughout the development, business and non-profit communities, and the evidence to date regarding their usefulness in enhancing the credibility, transparency and accountability of the rated  organizations;
• the benefits, whether tangible or intangible, financial or non-financial, that have accrued to rated organizations, and attendant costs, as a result of their participation in a certification program;
• the feasibility and utility of donor support for a common accreditation/ certification process for not-for-profit organizations in the international development field, and the role donors should play in the development, promotion and institutionalization of such a system.