Oh I cannot resist posting another blog message regarding the social impact assessment. This will provide new insights with a teaching video by McKinsey's philanthropy expert, Laura Callanan as well as social business leaders' talk on social innovation.
Although there are challenges in measuring social changes -- it takes money, time, imagination, and creativity--, it is necessary and important. The social impact assessment will allow enterprises to plan better and implement more effectively.
Often times assessment is considered the last stage in the process; however, McKinsey suggest a new approach, which could tackle all stages of operation in real time from planning to execution. How does it work?
Assessment is embedded in: setting strategy, designing programs, and defining program execution. The collected assessment results are linked to decision-making process, and the decision will affect the strategy lifecycle again. The assessment findings will be shared with both internally and externally so internal employees, funders, beneficiaries, academics, policy makers and the general public would know the impacts of social enterprises.
There are the 10 core beliefs that learning driven assessment have in mind:
From the 10 beliefs that the video teaching discussed, I want to share three take-away I have for us:
(1) Focus on dialogues among constituents and stakeholders; actors need to participate in the evaluation process so social programs could make greater impacts in the next time.
(2) Bring assessment in the beginning; this is not the final stage; this should be the part of the strategic planning so the enterprise/program can be more focused for the entire process.
(3) Assessment is for everyone in the enterprise; it is not only for a director, scholar or program evaluator; it can be related to engineers, technicians and/or operator. This can be done during a lunch hour with employees (not too formal). But it has to be the SAFE PLACE for evaluators so sharing evaluation results, i.e. negative and positive, would not harm anyone.
I hope you all check out the teaching video in the above link. I am curious how you would incorporate the learning driven assessment in your venture, if you are using it. Using your team lunch hour once a month to talk about assessment result among employees? Or creating surveys for constituents? How would you make the assessment environment safe enough to discuss both positive and negative impacts?
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