Digital Impact was created by the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford PACS and was managed until 2024. It is no longer being updated.
May 19, 2014
Creating social change is hard. And in an increasingly complex, interconnected world, the demand for tangible proof of social change and impact is only growing. The good news is our collective capacity for social change has also grown stronger. Around the world there are millions of organizations, billions of people, and trillions of dollars […]
May 15, 2014
Introduction The Cleveland Foundation, established in 1914, is the world’s first community foundation. That’s not just a factoid, but a cue to think about time and the speed of change. As place-based organizations, community foundations now operate at the core of some of the fastest moving global forces, with unprecedented urbanization topping the list. How […]
May 9, 2014
Chronicle of Philanthropy’s most recent article within its ‘Measuring Up’ section begins with a statement we know all too well: “One of the greatest challenges facing nonprofits is proving how effective they are.” From varied reports, irrelevant data, or not understanding what the data means, it’s a big challenge. To solve the problem, this article […]
May 8, 2014
“On April 28, 2014, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, or DATA Act, sending it to President Barack Obama for his signature. The DATA Act is the nation’s first legislative mandate for data transparency (set to) transform U.S. federal spending from disconnected documents into open, standardized data, and […]
May 7, 2014
Today we present to you a practical toolkit for nonprofits. More than that, it is a library, which everyone working in social innovation can access and use to develop their programs. This toolkit came to our attention via a long-standing friend of the site, Beth Kanter. —
May 5, 2014
Today, we’d like to take some lessons from the private sector. Most of us will be highly familiar with the sight of UPS delivering a parcel. What you probably don’t know is that their drivers are among the best paid in the industry, thanks in large part to their use of data. How, you ask? […]
April 29, 2014
Today we take a look at a call to action – an article from Foundation Center, via Philanthropy News Digest. The original piece’s writer, Jeannine Corey, Director of Grants Information Management at Foundation Center, highlights that their staff have spent the last 18 months working on the taxonomy behind Foundation Center. In this case, taxonomy […]
April 28, 2014
Last week, The Chronicle of Philanthropy highlighted a new report entitled ‘The Effect of Effectiveness,’ which demonstrated that despite all the current emphasis on data, it doesn’t always have the desired impact. Donors simply aren’t giving more based on better data – but is this true across the whole donor spectrum? We examined both the […]
April 23, 2014
A recent article in the Economist asks ‘why the backlash’ against data? Several articles have been written across a broad spectrum of established journals/news outlets that are very much anti-big data, yet the Economist responds with a counter point – a counter question even: Are we not just at an early adoption phase, similar to that […]
April 21, 2014
Today we would like to share with you a simple but highly effective list of data visualization tools for your organization. Assembled by Fast Company, this list brings together all types of software, from fresh looking pie charts, data maps, through to more complex “build it yourself” data visualization tools. — The full list, courtesy of Fast […]
