In addition to holding the “billionaire title,” these three individuals share a commitment to a new movement of social change, according to Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, co-authors of Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World. Bishop and Green believe that Gates, Clinton and Jolie are part of a new generation of wealthy, powerful people who are changing the role of philanthropy by combining focused, charitable donations with “big-business-style” investment strategies. Their book profiles several of these new philanthropists, including those listed above and other influentials like George Soros and U2’s Bono.
Bishop, American Business Editor/New York Bureau Chief for The Economist, explained the basis for focusing on the super-rich as...
We’ve previously mentioned our Portfolio Database Management System (PDMS), the tool we are developing (with the help of many) to aggregate and evaluate data about social enterprises. Yesterday was a big day for PDMS: the social metrics platform was announced yesterday at the Clinton Global Initiative, and articles about it appeared in both BusinessWeek and The New York Times.
Also announced at the Clinton Global Initiative was the launch of the ANDE network, which Brian blogged about here. The PDMS is currently being tested by a number of beta users, and we anticipate launching officially at the beginning of 2009. We’d love to launch with a name better than the bland PDMS acronym — any suggestions?
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This post first appeared on Acumen investee VisionSpring’s blog, Business in a Bag. We’ll be cross-posting with Business in a Bag from time to time.
The post’s author is Tim Johnson-Aramaki, a student at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, who spent the summer with VisionSpring India working on a data-collection methodology to measure the long-term impact of VisionSpring’s work on the lives of Vision Entrepreneurs and customers. His project is part of a multi-year impact study conducted by Professor Ted London at Michigan’s William Davidson Institute.
Over the last few months, I’ve been working to develop a survey instrument with the VisionSpring team here in Hyderabad and the William Davidson Institute team in Ann Arbor. The first...
It has been a busy summer here at the Acumen Fund New York office, where we’ve been working hard to implement website and blog changes that make it easier for our community to access data on and insights from our work.
On the website, it’s now possible to view metrics reported by many of our investees. These investment metrics are fed directly from our Portfolio Data Management System. We are not able to share all the available data, and some of our new investments are still in the process of collecting data, but we are committed to sharing as much information as we can, as often as we can – and this is a step in that direction.
If you are reading this at acumenfundblog.org, then you’ve already noticed the wholesale redesign we’ve given the site. If you’re reading via RSS,...
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...
What are you reading? What are the most popular blog and feed stories on this site? As part of our efforts to understand and track the use of this blog and its primary RSS feed, we dived into Google Analytics (see related posting on the basic metrics).The top twenty most viewed blog postings in 2007 and 2008 are:IAALD World Congress 2008e-Agriculture Week in RomeThe agricultural information specialist of the future?Conference: Participatory Web for DevelopmentICT and Agriculture sessions at WITFOR 2007Analyzing agricultural ICT projects in IndiaUSAIN 2008 ConferencePlanning Iran's agricultural Information SystemLifelong learning with farmers in Madurai, South IndiaAgricultural knowledge and development in a new age and a different worldWeb 2.0 for participatory development: Notes from...
In September 2006, we published a posting on IAALD blog metrics and use. We were proud to record 7,851 unique visitors and 18,500 page loads in the first year. How are we doing now?For this blog in 2007, 'StatCounter' recorded 36,000 page loads and 12,800 unique visitors (28,800 page loads and 10,800 visitors in 2006).Our RSS feeds and email alerts (that combine the blog posts with del.icio.us tagged items) were viewed 78,800 times in 2007, generating 2,500 clickthroughs to news items (this is sure rise in 2008 as we already recorded 22,000 views and 3,000 clickthroughs!).What are you reading? See the most viewed blog postings and feed items (at April 2008).Where are visitors coming from?ClusterMaps shows a truly global readership, except China, large chunks of Russia and Brazil, and some...