October 12, 2015
A huge shift is happening in the social sector. Dennis Whittle traces it all the way back to the birth of democracy in Greece circa 594 BCE. The people are sovereign! In titling our special theme ‘Beyond accountability: feedback as transformation’ we are signalling that the long march of democracy has arrived at...
October 9, 2015
What if a funder got real-time input from its grantees and other partners to develop its investment strategy? What if they used a design thinking process to not only get feedback from grantees but as a way to develop a more agile way of working? I was thrilled to work with...
September 29, 2015
Interest in topics like “data science,” “analytics,” and “big data” is growing in the nonprofit and education sectors. Attendance at training programs, salons, and conferences like NTEN’s annual conference, Do Good Data or Stanford Social Innovation Review’s Data on Purpose is booming. And it’s no surprise – we...
August 12, 2015
For the first interview in our Community Insights series, we sit down with Andrew Means, Co-Founder of The Impact Lab.
August 5, 2015
Around USD $1 trillion a year, that’s the amount of money that is (conservatively) estimated to be lost each year due to corruption, fraud and mismanagement (BMZ, 2011). That’s an incomprehensible number, but it’s clear that this huge sum of money, if used effectively, could have a transformational...
May 20, 2015
The market engine behind our nonprofit service economy is the act of funders and donors “proxy buying” a service or program on behalf of a population. Analogous to “in loco parentis,” where a school plays the role of the parent while children are in their care, in the nonprofit...
March 12, 2015
Since at least the early ‘90s, those involved in the generation of more than money have been on a quest to capture the right balance between documentation of impact and claims to same. For me personally, I have been a reluctant crusader in this quest for coming on thirty years....
March 6, 2015
I’ve pondered this question over the last few weeks and months, moving between meetings with brilliant pioneers in digital technology, and events and articles on its role in the social sector. The consensus seems to be that digital transformation is about digital, and about transformation. That’s about as clear...
February 26, 2015
Here at Development Initiatives and Development Research and Training (DRT) we are currently piloting a ‘Joined-Up Data’ study in Uganda. We have been working in the rural districts of Kitgum and Katakwi, following the emergence of two issues: (1) the really bad results of students completing primary education, and (2) the unacceptably...
February 25, 2015
Your professional network is your greatest asset no matter the stage of your nonprofit career, whether you are an emerging leader or an acknowledged thought leader in your industry or somewhere in between. When you intentionally build your professional network in the right way, you create a circle of...
