Measuring the success of social ventures

All projects are designed and launched with some kind of return on investment in mind: students go to school to get an education, eventually find a job and monetize (or not) the return on the years they spent in school, managers oversee projects and measure their success by how much return they generate… Social ventures are no exception! Organizations and individuals involved in social ventures seek to understand how much social, environmental and economic value they are creating. While for-profits rely heavily on numbers to evaluate their success, social ventures also have to consider qualitative data such as descriptions and impressions. People tackle evaluating projects differently. One might go with a comparison of a before and after situation. Others go with comparing the current situation with standards (worldwide or comparable regions, situations…). Another way is to look at the trends since the beginning of the project. I personally believe that the third one is to most effective one because it not only give a view of a before and after but also what happened in between which could include crucial information about problems that might have occurred or unexpected changes. One question that comes to my mind is to what extend is the third evaluation method feasible for social ventures.

When reading about social ventures and projects, the first thing that comes to my mind is what the outcome was and whether it is sustainable. However, I came to realize by doing more readings and researching that even “failed” projects have to be evaluated properly. Looking at both sides of the spectrum will first enable us to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the projects and what made them successful or not. Also, this would enable us to detect trends and factors that contributed to these successes or failures over time hence the use of the third evaluation method. Let’s take the example of the Case Foundation PlayPumps’ initiative. The idea behind the project seemed very innovative at the time: design water pumps activated by merry go around for children: children will play and at the same time generate water. However, over the course of time, the initiative started facing many problems: the children’s needs to play were not as high as anticipated and they quickly got bored and stopped playing causing a shortage of water generation. The other problem was a consequence of the previous one and it is the overhead that the project placed on women as they had to start “playing” on the merry go around to pump water. Women were embarrassed by doing so but they were the primary care givers to their families and pumping water was one of their tasks. In addition to this, the water pumping system had technical issues and the villagers were not trained to fix them. Due to these problems, the PlayPump project came to be a lesson learned for the Case Foundation instead of a successful initiative. One can look at the project and say ok so before people did not have water and after they still did not have water, thus the project failed its mission. While this is true, by doing a before and after evaluation we would be missing on what went wrong and the true causes of the failure of the project: too much reliance on a segment of the community, the children, reliance on habits of the community, playing, lack of knowledge to fix the pump, women’s embarrassment to pump water because of the play factor… The lessons learned can only be extracted from the life of the projects and not the extremities. The same goes for successful projects, we need to start thinking twice when we are presented with before and after data that shows the success of the projects. The VisionSpring project recognized the social problems that were caused by wives being more independent and attracted their husbands to join the project workforce too. The success of the project is now beyond just selling glasses. It created some kind of stability and resolved a problem that was caused by the project itself. These kind of "details" make a big difference when evaluating social ventures.