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‘Ready, Steady, Scale!’: A Practical Tool to Assess Your Social Business
To scale in base-of-the-pyramid markets, social ventures need to learn to operate and grow in complex, uncertain and resource-limited markets, and become highly adaptive to market and social context. That's why the MIT Practical Impact Alliance developed "Ready, Steady, Scale!" It's a guide to help inclusive business practitioners better understand their organization’s readiness for scale and to clearly identify opportunities for improvement.
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- Entrepreneurship
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Want to Know How to Properly Measure Financial Inclusion? Copy the Retailers.
To better understand and measure how people use financial services, i2i looked outside the industry to the retail sector, which is at the forefront of how to collect and analyze data on how consumers engage with their services. In particular, retailers understand key usage indicators fundamental to their business; namely recency, frequency, monetary value and duration. That led i2i to apply these indicators while studying how to improve financial services.
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- Financial Inclusion
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What We’re Learning Every Step of the Energy Ladder
We spent the last year at Acumen collecting impact data on companies across our portfolio using our Lean Data approach, which harnesses the power of technology to give voice to low-income customers and allows us to provide quality customer feedback to drive business decisions for our investees. From these surveys, our entrepreneurs will get real insight into their customers: who they are, how and where they utilize energy, how much energy they use, and what they spend on a weekly or monthly basis, among other valuable feedback.
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- Energy, Impact Assessment, Technology
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NexThought Monday: Impact and the Science of Social Networks – More Bang For Your Buck
The basic principle behind network science is very simple: Things are connected, and the ways they are connected affect their individual and collective performance. Network science offers a powerful solution for providing insights about impact. Understanding and harnessing it would allow social entrepreneurs and investors to design and implement data-based strategies.
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- Impact Assessment
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A Shared Destination: Why we need open source impact metrics
Developers of impact measurement systems should provide an open repository of metrics and allow other users to customize them to their own context and needs. Such systems would also allow users to easily frame goals and build standard-based reports accordingly. Only with shared best practices and collaboration among the organizations will the social sector be able to produce a higher impact.
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- Impact Assessment, Technology
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- Impact Assessment, metrics
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Mobile Data Has the Answers, But First, We Need to Ask the Right Questions
I’ve realized that when guiding social enterprises, nonprofits and international NGOs to begin using data, it’s helpful to focus on a key, sometimes obvious point: data has to actually answer a critical business or programmatic question. Mobile data collection for the sake of collecting data isn’t enough.
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- Energy, Impact Assessment, Technology
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Consent as Conversation: Lean research in vulnerable settings
Whether research unfolds in Harvard Square or a remote village, in our home communities or in a context with which we are newly familiar, we hope to question our assumptions on agency, power, risk, and vulnerability. In this post, the authors focus on making informed consent a truly meaningful process, particularly when conducting research in vulnerable settings.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
- Tags
- academia, Impact Assessment, metrics, research
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Building a Collaborative Social Impact Measurement Operating System
If social sector organizations truly want to compete against the large corporations, they must build an efficient performance management system where even the small organization can derive value and understand their limitations.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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