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Guest blogger Kelly McCarthy is a Communications Manager and Research Analyst for the New Ventures Project at the World Resources Institute. Her current work focuses on developing impact metrics for the enterprise development community.

By Kelly McCarthy 

There was a lot of buzz about "impact" last weekend at the  Net Impact Conference. However, this year it wasn't just talk about creating impact, but most importantly how we consider, measure and prove it.  Perhaps the word was being used too liberally lately thus loosing a bit of its meaning. 

However, as I listened to many organizations whose work intends to generate positive environmental and social impact, it became apparent that a shift is occurring.  Rather than talking simply about impact in anecdotes and what was better than before, foundations, funds, design-for-impact, not-for-profit (and not-for-loss) organizations alike were talking about a "social capital market", as Jason Saul, CEO of Mission Measurement, summed it up during one of the panels. 

Following are some of the thoughts that came to mind from the perspective of metrics and evaluation while attending some of the sessions at the conference.

In a session titled Hype vs. Reality, panelists dug into the nitty-gritty of how we measure, monitor, and evaluate our work.  "Everyone does knowledge management and monitoring and evaluation poorly," said Elizabeth Nitze, VP of Ashoka.  "After so much time we in the enterprise development sector are looking around wondering, what the heck happened?  What are the best-practices?  There are none." There was a unanimous nod of heads from fellow panelists and audience members around the room.  However, in a sector that believes in the positive potential impacts of social entrepreneurs, there is light at the end of the tunnel. 

Indeed, the conversation turned optimistic as panelists Brian Milder (from Root Captial) and Elizabeth Wallace Elders (from globalislocal) joined Nitze in a discussion about the mash-up of innovative minds at Google.org, Salesforce, and Acumen Fund leading the effort to develop what is currently being called the Portfolio Data Management System (PDMS).  Officially announced at the Clinton Global Initiative, the PDMS is a web-based tool designed to track, share, and compare portfolio performance data with the ultimate intention of helping the enterprise development community better manage, communicate, and maximize our collective impact.

This is all well and good, but does it pass the "so what" test?  And will other efforts similar to the PDMS actually help improve how we talk about and demonstrate impact? 

I thought I'd find an answer to these questions at a session titled Measuring Impact.  For 90 minutes, panelists explored trends and questioned commonly held models for "proving" the impact of our work.  Of great interest to me was a comparison of where the panelists thought we have been and where they thought we were going.  According to the panel, we are coming out of a time where impact was measured independently, there was no true sense of urgency, accountability was a major theme, and "better than before" was the measure of success. 

We are now moving into a time where we are starting to see success measured in the positive sense rather that just "what didn't happen" - we are starting to shift away from the use of the term "non" to describe what we do.  In fact, the panelists spoke about the "business of impact", referring to the fact that those that fund the work in this space are actually acting within a market that "sells and buys impact." 

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Guest blogger Miguel Jardine is a first-year MBA student at Thunderbird School of Global Management where he focuses on Green Capital Allocation.  At Thunderbird, he has further developed his ideas on Triple Bottom Line value propositions and the leadership role of business in igniting meaningful progress in solving the environmental and socioeconomic challenges of our times. 

Miguel was born in Panama and traveled through Asia led by his fascination with intercultural collaboration.

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Guest blogger Karen Lynn Vincent, a serial social benefit entrepreneur, is the co-founder and current chief operating officer at Resdida, a hybrid social business distributing content via mobile devices to the rural poor. She also works with the Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) in the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University.

She sent us the following post from Santa Clara, California, where the Transformative Changes through Science and Technology: The Role for Social Benefit Entrepreneurs conference took place last week.

By Karen Lynn Vincent

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I had the opportunity to attend the Tech Museum Awards ceremony last week in San Jose, California.  What's interesting about this annual event is not just the social entrepreneurs and their sometimes quite remarkable innovations, but also the way Silicon Valley turns out to honor them and, at least for an evening, to focus on applying entrepreneurial skills to benefit poor people. This year the event was attended by some 1,500 people including many of the Valley's wealthiest and most powerful Venture Capitalists, CEOs, and networkers.

The mix of enterprises changes every year.This year was especially rich in BoP energy enterprises with seven entries. The prize winner was Distributed Energy Systems India, or DESI Power (desi means land or village in Hindi), which builds biomass power plants to generate electricity in villages that lack access to it. DESI trains locals to run the plants and also incubates local businesses that need power and enlarge the customer base for the model.

A wearable solar lighting system that stores up power in a cellphone battery and yields several hours of light in the evenings and technology for modifying diesel engines to run on virtually any plant oil were also intriguing.   

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Last Saturday morning was gray, rainy and windy in Philadelphia, but it didn't keep the Net Impact conference from building momentum. I began the day attending a session led by the Base of the Pyramid Protocol team. It was interesting to get a closer feel of this tool; a detailed summary of the session will be posted here in NextBillion by its organizers (NextBillion co-founder John Paul, Patrick Donaheau, and others) so stay tuned for that.

At the end of this session I walked down to prepare for the next panel "Unreasonable People: The Role of Entrepreneurs in Shaping Tomorrow's Markets". It was moderated by Virginia Barreiro, Global Director of New Ventures at WRI. Panelists were Agnes Dasewicz from the Grassroots Business Fund, Ben Powell from Agora Partnerships and John Elkington, co-founder of Volans Ventures and author of the book that inspired the panel's title.  

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It has been a fascinating morning, not without a funny feeling of nostalgia. A year ago I was logging in to read about the happenings at the Net Impact conference during my breaks writing essays and completing business school applications. In all of them, I tried to make sure to state my interest in joining a chapter and become part of this community.

A year later I am at the conference, not as a student but with my colleagues from WRI. I'm also running into familiar faces like the remarkable folks that were going to be my classmates at Michigan's Ross School of Business.

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Guest blogger Sami Nerenberg is an adjunct faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design, teaching the advanced studio Design for Social Entrepreneurship. She also is a member of the Grain collaborative and previously worked for the nonprofits, Design that Matters and Greenblue.

Co-contributors to this article include Alan Harlem, Caitlin Cohen, & Marina Kim.

By Sami Nerenberg

This weekend I had the honor of participating in Brown/RISD's first ever Better World by Design conference as both a workshop leader and panelist discussing the role of design in social entrepreneurship. This year's Social Entrepreneurship Panel was moerated by Alan Harlam, Director of Social Entrepreneurship at the Brown Swearer Center. Joining the panel were Caitlin Cohen, Co-Founder of Mali Health Organizing Project, Marina Kim from Ashoka's Global Academy University Program and myself.

Three panelists and one moderator, all from different backgrounds, came together and set out to discuss the following: 

1. What is design?
   
2. How does design play a role in social entrepreneurship?
   
3. How do interdisciplinary groups of designers, engineers, business men/women and more, come together to work effectively?

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Today I am posting the results of a unique partnership and a novel experiment in furthering social entrepreneurship, the fruits of an effort launched on this site a year ago.

The partners were Santa Clara University's Global Social Benefit Incubator and World Resources Institute, and the attached white paper bears the names of Jim Koch (of GSBI), myself-then of WRI, now with Ashoka: Innovators for the Public-and Francisco Noguera, who has continued the water work at WRI.

The idea was to extend the scaling impact of the GSBI by recruiting a cluster of social enterprises within a single sector for the 2008 class, to add research on the sector as a whole, to involve water experts as well as the silicon valley VCs and CEOs in mentoring process of the water enterprise cluster so as to use them to provide a preliminary benchmark for the sector-and then to share what we learned so that other water entrepreneurs worldwide could build on that knowledge. 

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Following Jocelyn's post and just to keep the conversation going about the role of design in the development through enterprise field, here are two recommendations for your typical Tuesday afternoon.

First, please go over to Ethan Zuckerman's blog and read why good design and innovation are constraints-driven. You'll have a laugh or two (Ethan's writing simply takes you places) and you'll feel inspired by his insights and by the stories he delivers.

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Guest blogger Jocelyn Wyatt works for the design firm IDEO, leading its base of the pyramid projects. Prior to joining IDEO, Jocelyn was an Acumen Fund Fellow in Kenya. She holds a MBA from Thunderbird. Jocelyn blogs at Design and Reach.

She sent us the following post following her attendance to the Better World by Design Conference last week in Providence, Rhode Island.

By Jocelyn Wyatt

The Better World by Design Conference was hosted last week by Brown University and the Rhode Island Design Institute (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island. I attended the conference as a speaker and was impressed that the event was entirely student organized and run. The conference drew about 200 people from the design industry, private sector, social sector, and academia. We heard from a good mix of practitioners, consultants, and researchers.

The conference mapped closely to IDEO's Design for Social Impact initiative so it was very much in-line with the work we've been doing for the past year. Just as way of background, the purpose of IDEO's design for social impact work is to cause transformational change in communities of need.

One theme that was repeated throughout the conference was the importance of developing empathy. We heard from Ross Evans (founder of Xtracycle and World Bike  and Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity,  about the need to live and eat in the communities we are designing with. We must work to understand the complexities of the local context and be sure to work closely with local partners. While this seems like an obvious tenant of design, many people at the conference shared market insights but didn't share stories of people or human insights. We need to make sure that we're looking not just as what's for sale at markets and what is being advertised, but that we actually talk to people about what they want and need.

A second theme which was emphasized at this conference as well as at the Design in the Developing World panel at SoCap, was the need to apply design thinking to business models, distribution systems, and marketing. As Emily Pilloton, Founder of Project H said, "design is easy; implementation is tough." This was reiterated by Paul Polak who spoke about the need to design products and their distribution cheaply enough so companies can be profitable by selling them and multinationals will be enticed to enter base of the pyramid markets.

Finally there was a general sense of excitement at the conference, accompanied by a sense of urgency. There was a feeling that social design, or design for the greater good, was catching on, both within the design industry, as well as within the social sector and low-income markets. There was little discussion about how to run a business by working with clients who are not able to pay (or pay much) for design services.

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