Measuring Social Impact With Conflicting Stakeholders

The readings about how to effectively assess social impact got me thinking about the best combination of talents to achieve desired outcomes, as priorities and ethics vary widely across stakeholders. Over the summer, I went to a Department of Education/USAID meeting about better collaboration and communication across their similar initiatives. I met a representative from an organization called The Partnering Initiative, which aims to strategically design effective collaboration amongst society, businesses, and the government. I read through some of their case studies and I found one called Conflicting Cultures that exemplifies this week’s theme of setting up a system that allows you to effectively manage and assess impact.

This case provides an account of an attempt at a partnership between a UN agency and a multinational company. While they agreed on the common interest of addressing child labor in an Asian country through improving primary education, they immediately encountered differences regarding their internal procedures. The UN and the company not only had different internal requirements for projects, but they made decisions differently and in different time frames. Aside from these internal communication issues, the actual country that they were hoping to positively impact was going through its own changes, causing more uncertainty and requiring more changes.  The differences between these organizations combined with the lack of flexibility on both of their parts caused the partnership to deteriorate.

I really liked Pim’s way of describing how to measure social value- “I personally think that a combination between clear objective criteria on the one hand and transparency about subjective opinions is a good way to 'measure' social value.” If the two different organizations not only defined their objectives but also articulated their personal subjective goals, then both parties have a clear view of each others’ willingness to contribute to the cause and what that means regarding how each organization is run.

Aside from discussing initial specific roles, I wonder what other tactics can prepare partnerships for evolution within the project. In many social ventures with multiple stakeholders, there is often the main driver of the innovation and the party that gains some sort of outside benefit from it. It is important to have an ‘intermediary’ who can bridge gaps and focus more on the future of the project as opposed to current circumstances. In Measuring Social Impact, Mulgan discusses effective supply and effective demand as an effective means to evaluate social value. It can be expected that situations, strategies, and scopes will change, so which organization should make more concessions- the supplier or the demander?