Stanford Social Innovation Review

Google’s philanthropy, dubbed DotOrg, launched in 2004 with bold ambitions and almost $1 billion in seed funding. But the corporate culture built by engineers proved challenging for the development experts brought in to run DotOrg. Six years later, the philanthropy’s leadership has been replaced and its ambitions have shrunk.

People are more likely to engage in moral behavior when they are in a clean-scented room.

A San Francisco social media campaign aims to increase awareness of everything from workers’ rights to nontoxic cleaning products that reduce health risks for domestic workers and employers alike.

Express Credit Union reopens in Seattle to serve the unbanked, underbanked, and want-to-be-banked.

New research shows that buying green products makes people more likely to cheat and steal.

This is my third posting in a series on shared services alliances in the nonprofit sector. Too often when we talk about strategic restructuring we discuss only merger models; but there are a wide variety of partial integration models that are extremely creative and productive. These other models expand the mission of nonprofits but they rarely get discussed. I hope my series begins to address that imbalance.

This month I want to share the story of the David and Laura Merage Foundation, based in Colorado, and their efforts to strengthen the Early Care and Education (ECE) industry… (continue reading this post)

Headline-grabbing problems like global warming and extreme poverty garner most of philanthropy’s money and energy, while less visible but no less important problems like the decline of the news media—one of the foundations of civil society—are often ignored. Without a healthy civil society, however, it becomes difficult if not impossible to solve the other, more readily apparent problems.

Philanthropedia cofounder Deyan Vitanov wants to make it easier for donors to see the impact of the organizations they fund. That’s why he has created a new tool that bases its recommendations on the opinions of over 1,000 experts.

You don’t often see the words “cool” and “annual report” in the same sentence. For the most part nonprofit annual reports are either “compliance documents” or highly polished brochures that donors flip through and then put in the recycling.

But a few nonprofits have been playing with new formats for annual reports that help donors better understand their organization. The key to an annual report being useful and compelling for a donor is that the report… (continue reading this blog post)

Funders, nonprofit executives, and policymakers are very enthusiastic about measuring social value. Alas, they cannot agree on what it is or how to assess it. Their main obstacle is assuming that social value is objective, fixed, and stable. When people approach social value as subjective, malleable, and variable, they create better metrics to capture it.

In a recent report listing its ten core beliefs about how foundations can increase the impact of their grants, McKinsey & Co. identified its number one core belief as follows:

“Hear the constituent voice.
Involve constituents at every stage of the assessment.”

One innovative way the philanthropic community might access the “constituent’s voice” is through user reviews… (continue reading this blog post)

Are you sad that the World Cup is over? 

Well, last Friday, July 22nd the SF professional chapter of Net Impact and the Bay Area chapter of the HUB “kicked” off a very different type of competition to see which one of these social entrepreneur networks does the most good. 

It’s the first competition of its sort in which members ‘check-in’ their good deeds online and get awarded points.  At the end of a month… (continue reading this blog post)

UNESCO’s 2010 Education for All Global Monitoring Report is sobering, particularly when it comes to statistics in Sub-Saharan Africa. Almost half of the global, out-of-school population is in this region and more than half of them are girls.

Education plays a pivotal role in building human capital and increasing productivity of the economy. In particular, secondary education… (continue reading blog post)

Literally years in the making, July 22, 2010 was a day of enthusiastic celebration for many across the social sector as the Obama Administration announced the eleven grantees of the new Social Innovation Fund (SIF). 

Established by the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, SIF will support some of the nation’s most innovative and groundbreaking foundations and nonprofits.  As Commongood Careers and Talent Initiative are dedicated to supporting the growth and development of such organizations, we have watched with eager anticipation over the past year as this historic legislation was brought to life by the team administering the funds… (continue reading this blog post)

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” as Paul Romer, Stanford economist, once said . Sadly, we may be wasting this one. 

To take just one data point, under the best likely scenario, it may take 5 years to get employment back to pre-crash levels.

There should be no doubt that this is a crisis, no matter what you want to call it - “Great Recession”, “Great Reset”, or “Second Great Depression”. Our hair should be on fire, as UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong has noted, yet it is odd how quiet things seem.  Aside from the Tea Party cacophony… (continue reading this blog post)