Still a long way to go.

This week’s readings remind me a question: how to evaluate the social impact of education on children? Scores and grades are easy to be observed. And long-term and comparative research about behavior changes can also indicate a general trend of the impact, improving or deteriorating. It is like the gym case in Impact Alpha’s article. Research and Bridges’ experience shows that getting first-time gym users to join, stay and change their health habits can be a game-changer, with preventive health benefits for which insurers and others are increasingly willing to pay. As Trelstad said, in this way we can see all the impact homerun opportunities to think about ways to connect the social-finance dots around gyms.

Patrick also said that in each targeted case, impact benchmarks and milestones would be clear and Bain would report under the so-called GIIRS rating standards developed by the nonprofit B Lab. Take one step further, big data analysis may be a chance for social impact measurement by tracking and recording a tridimensional database of behavior changes. This may be useful for the third impact theme: community-building which is aimed at creating jobs and catalyzing economic activity in areas of chronic unemployment. We can use the changes in the unemployment rate, GDP per capita, or numbers of new jobs created to evaluate the outcomes of social impact programs.

However, I have read another article called “Genetic influence on human psychological traits: A survey”, which summarized some research findings that our traits/talents were significantly influenced by genetic factors[i]. Thus, taking individual differences into account, only depending on what we have observed is not reliable. It is hard for us to measure that whether our education is effective or we just lucky enough to meet some smart and resilient children. We cannot easily separate the influence of genetic factors from the impact of external environmental factor-education. 

The same as Rick who holds a negative viewpoint about the impact assessment. The SIBs (Social impact bonds) case indicates that public programs even don’t measure the results, or fail to track outcomes, decouple funding from effectiveness, and prioritize compliance with rules.

After reading this week’s passages, I feel that investing into the social impact area is one thing, and proving that the spending is effective and efficient is another thing. But developing/finding some scientific methods to justify the spending is not a long-period effort (reasonable 10-12 years according to the McKinsey’s report). We admit that every investment carries risks, although it is a government-funded social program using our (taxpayers’) own money, it hasn’t to be successful. At least the investment/funding itself encourages and promotes initiative willing and actions to address social problems.

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[i] Ilska, J., Haskell, M. J., Blott, S. C., Sánchez-Molano, E., Polgar, Z., Lofgren, S. E., . . . Wiener, P. (2017, June 01). Genetic Characterization of Dog Personality Traits. Retrieved September 26, 2017, from http://www.genetics.org/content/206/2/1101