November 18, 2013
Markets for Good is an effort to improve the system for generating, sharing, and acting upon data and information in the social sector. Our vision is of a social sector powered by information. Our practice is open conversation with you, our audience. To date, we’ve covered many topics on our blog including: Beneficiary Insights, Open […]
November 4, 2013
I hope we have your attention. (Disco ball??) This month’s theme – Collaboration – is not an easy one. Thanks to many years of the sharpest minds studying how we can better work together, we might be prone to think we understand it. But, simply understanding collaboration is itself a problem if practice lags behind. […]
October 30, 2013
Sunand Menon, previous Markets For Good guest author of one our most highly visited posts, has offered a recent thought piece (Stop Assuming Your Data Will Bring You Riches) that deserves a deeper examination. I’d like to use it to raise more questions (not give answers) about the pathways to sustainable business models for open […]
October 7, 2013
Our Data?? Less and less guarded in ye olde smoke-filled room… (Left, ejh) In keeping with our focus on data infrastructure, we’re staying under the hood to consider the business models that define our work: how we sustain market presence and attract the funding to do that while working with Open Data. …
October 3, 2013
[Originally posted on GrandChallenges.org, we thought this is worth another look: a search for solutions that improve the feedback loop to ensure that the voices of small farmers are actually heard and that their feedback is properly incorporated into development programs.] “Smallholder farmers should be full participants in defining, implementing, and evaluating projects intended to […]
September 30, 2013
The Markets for Good web campaign was launched last October by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation CEO Jeff Raikes at the Social Capital Markets (SOCAP12) conference in San Francisco. A year on, we’d like to give you a recap of our progress and what we’ve learned so far. We’ll cover the Markets for Good […]
September 17, 2013
Information privacy is a challenge for large and small organizations alike. We’re most familiar with it as an external force requiring social-sector businesses to guard constituent privacy or protect business data from external access, just as for any type of business. Complicating that work is the weight and speed of technological and social change, regarding […]
September 13, 2013
In 60 seconds, tell us: “Who are you, what do you do, and how does data matter in your work?” Through the simple prompt above, we “Speed Dataed” attendees of the Social Capital Markets Conference 2013 (SOCAP13), one year after the launch of Markets for Good at SOCAP12. Why should we talk about data at SOCAP? Markets […]
September 11, 2013
This post is the last in our series on Nonprofit Decision-Making. And we’re closing out with a critical look at viability… Every mission has underlying assumptions that either inform or strictly define the business model. It’s time to bring those assumptions to the front and test them to ensure that the way you go about your […]
August 22, 2013
“Stop. Check capacity.” How can we talk about decision-making without a serious look at the quality of inputs, in this case, the capacity of the organization itself? Just a quick note here to highlight one example of work to move us forward in that respect in the social sector. [image: ejh] Full text below from: […]
