Last week, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jordan Kassalow, Graham Macmillan and Miriam Stone – three staff members at VisionSpring – to conduct a long-form interview. Formerly known as Scojo Foundation, VisionSpring is the pioneering base of the pyramid-focused enterprise working to provide access to eyeglasses in low-income communities around the world.
Acumen Fund is an investor in VisionSpring, having made a $500K debt investment back in 2006. We’ve followed their progress for a long time, up to and including their recent name change and announcement of a 5-year fundraising prospectus.
Rob Katz, Acumen Fund: How, when and why did you get involved with VisionSpring?
Jordan Kassalow, Chairman and Co-Founder, VisionSpring: It was very practical. I spotted a market...
Many of us in the base of the pyramid community, myself included, often wonder, “is this business really making a social impact?” Sure, there are real indicators of success, but what action drove that particular outcome? As I ponder the social impact of business, I’m reminded of an old marketing adage: We know at least 50 percent of our efforts are working – we just don’t know which half. (Hat tip to Brian Trelstad for bringing this up in a meeting.)
In order to build truly inclusive businesses, our sector must start tracking impact over time. This we can probably all agree on. But the challenge is not so much in creating buy-in around the idea of measurement, but in finding a way to integrate an effective and user-friendly system for doing so in an already resource-constrained...