So, it seemed time to write down what I know about social impact metrics but two points first.

1) My perspective is as practical as I am capable of. 

2) Everything that I know I have distilled from people much smarter than I am. 

Holy Grail?

So, why are social impact metrics a holy grail.  The first reason is because we think of them as a holy grail.  Social impact metrics are thought of as a singular measurement system parallel to profit and loss statements. However, money adds and subtracts easily because it is an abstraction of value.  Money is not valuable itself.  Happiness, peace, security, health, knowledge, these are intrinsically valuable. So, if there is no currency of good, what then?  It is my belief that we have to take two approaches to understand social impact: 1) define and measure proxies for impact, 2) survey stakeholders to understand "customer satisfaction".  These are the nascent methodologies that we need in order to provide a relevant juxtaposition to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

Before I get in to the details of how this can and has been done on the Force.com platform, I would like to make the case for why it is important.  The first reason is easy.  As a social sector organization, you want to know if you are any good.  But it is more than that.  If our troubled world is to heal itself, then we need more and more effective resources working on the problems that face us. We need to be very smart about how we apply solutions, improving those that seem to work and moving resources from those that don't.  The best measures we have for this (Longevity, scale, size, ...) are only  descriptors of the organizations that do the work as opposed to the more relevant descriptors of the impact of the work itself.  In order to move past measuring the organization and towards measuring social progress, we have to couch all of our impact in terms of the problems we are trying to solve.  This gives us the added benefit of being able to aggregate data with multiple actors that are working to solve the same problem.  To be specific, we must, 1) define the problem we are working to solve, 2) define what the world would look like if the problem were solved, 3) measure our efforts in terms of their ability to move the needle from problem to solution. We must also do the very difficult work of agreeing on the structures and methodologies of 1, 2 and 3.

Social Impact Data Collection and the Force.com Platform

I am interested, first, in measuring the social impact of specific organizations because this requires attention to be paid to things like audit trails and compliance.  With out this sort of rigor, we cannot hope to compete with GAAP.  Historically, social impact data collection and reporting systems have been siloed or not intimately connected to an organization's data management system (MIS, CRM, ERP, etc).  With the flexibility of Platform As A Service and the availability of cloud computing, social impact data collection can be incidental to an organization's daily operations.  An example of this is, if I am a classroom teacher taking attendance and I mark not only "Present" for Bobby Hernandez but I also mark "4 out of 5" for that day for him. That data point is only slightly relevant by itself but aggregated across a semester, a student, a teacher, a year, a school... In this case, the extent to which Bobby is engaged in school on a daily basis is one proxy for a school's contribution to Bobby's success in the world.

The reasons why Force.com is particularly well suited to this environment are:

1. It is built from the ground up as a Enterprise class Constituent (Customer) Management System (CRM) and it is in use by over 50,000 companies and over 1,000,000 users across the globe so It has all the appurtenances of a world class CRM.
2. It is deeply configurable through a best of breed and fully open API.
3. Because Force.com is in the cloud (and has an open API), many of the hurdles to aggregating data across a sector are removed. Specifically, we don't need to think about old-school systems integration but instead, leveraging XML data standards, we can do data integration which means that we can independently publish data nd digest data which dramatically reduces cost and politics.

Operational Data Collection Design

A specific example of this is Family Services Agency (FSA) of San Francisco. FSA is San Francisco's largest mental health services provider and they serve the communities with the greatest needs. When FSA began their salesforce.com implementation they had only a handful of email addresses for over a hundred employees.  All of their patient data was on paper on file folders, all of it. Their programmatic goals where all about number of clients served and hours billed. 

After they implemented salesforce.com, they were are able to move from 12 hours on paperwork per hour of client interation to a ratio of 3/1. These operational efficiencies meant that they could change their programmatic goals from clients served to progress towards a mental health cure.

In this screen shot, you can see how explicit goals can be referenced directly with in the context of data entry in the case management system.  So, reports can be generated to reference not only billable hours, but also progress towards goals.

Another fantastic example of this is the Center for Employment Opportunities.  In the video below, CEO's presentation starts at the 16'th minute and the measurement specific part is at 25:50.

I have less data on the process of surveying stakeholders but the basic idea is that if your stakeholders believe that you are doing a good job then you probably are.  Customer satisfaction as a proxy for impact.  A great place to find out more about this is Keystone Reporting in the UK and this issue of Alliance magazine.

Data Aggregation to measure social impact across a sector

PULSE

This system has gotten a lot of attention, especially for something that is not fully rolled out yet. It has been written about in Business Week and the NY Times blog Bits Blog.  The system was originally designed by Acumen Fund and Google.org to help Acumen Fund measure it's impact across their portfolio.  Acumen Fund realized that they were on to something and offered other social investment organizations to take a look.  All were impressed and now, via the Aspen Network for Development Entrepreneurs, we are going to rebuild the system on the force.com platform.  This will provide scalability, simple provisioning, and access to the full Force.com ecosystem.  Many of the organizations in ANDE were already using salesforce.com for their investment pipeline management. The Pulse system will be built using visualforce for the entire user experience and we will build in the ability to export a PULSE flavor of XBRL.  These XBRL feeds will be sent to Price Waterhouse Coopers who will digest and steward this data.  The hope is to leverage this system for other similar environments like grant management.

Grant Management

A major hurdle to social impact measurement for nonprofit orgs is that foundations don't measure their own impact effectively.  Several organizations are now using salesforce.com to manage their grants.  An aggregating environment like PULSE would be fantastic for this.  The Grantsfire initiative has defined the hGrant microformat to represent information on grants that have been made that can be human readable as HTML on a web page or machine readable and indexed as data. It would not be difficult to provide a way to export hGrant data from salesforce.com.