NVSQ Blog

The Nobel prize in economics awarded to Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer in December 2019 has consecrated their game-changing work against poverty. At the heart of their work are experimental approaches using Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs), which have shed new light on the way the impact of social innovations can be assessed. RCTs compare the impact of a measure between a treatment group and a control group whose participants are selected at random. They are a powerful way to remove biases and isolate a specific action from the great swirl of other factors that may affect the result. However, they are far from being a “one-size-fits-all” approach because they are complex to set up and impose significant technical and financial demands on the organization. They also frequently require long timeframes to set up and run – running into years and decades – making them poor tools to help businesses and investors execute short- to medium-term strategies. RCTs work well to establish causal links between a given intervention and social impact. However, in many instances, the impact evaluation needs for innovators and their supports are quite different – with much more need for tools that can guide performance improvements rather than prove outcomes. The latest research by Anne-Claire Pache and Greg Molecke for the Handbook of Inclusive Innovation suggests that these needs vary based on where social innovators stand in the innovation cycle. We need to focus on what organizations need and what they can actually do if we want impact assessments to truly drive development and increase impact.

Continue reading “For a pragmatic approach to social impact assessment”

Michaela Neumayr & Astrid Pennerstorfer, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business.

What amount of donations can you expect from people when fundraising for your organization? Who are the people who do not donate any money at all, and who are those who donate substantial amounts? Basically, charitable donations are considered to strongly vary across income classes, and fundraisers know that the amounts of individuals’ donations increase with their financial resources. But what proportion of income can you expect to be donated by people of different income groups?  Which income groups are more ‘generous’, those with higher or lower incomes?

Such questions have been discussed in scholarly research since the 1990s and answers to these questions are surprisingly diverse and even contradictory. In the debate concerning the “charitable giving profile” all kinds of shapes have been proposed. Some argue that it follows a U-shaped curve, with individuals at both ends of the income distribution donating the highest proportions of their income. For the US, for instance, those below an annual income of 10,000 USD donate about 4.6% of their income, while those with an income higher than 150,000 USD give 2.2%, and those in the middle 1.4%. Other studies do not find that lower-income groups are more generous, but rather describe the charitable-giving profile as a flat curve with an upward slope for higher-income groups. Yet other studies doubt the upwards swing on the right-hand side and instead find higher relative donation levels for lower income groups. We could go on with an account of yet other assumed shapes of previous studies, but we stop at this point to tell you about our study.

Continue reading “How much of their income do people usually donate to charity?”

Bryant Crubaugh, Pepperdine University, Malibu.

Neighborhood equity requires more than the inclusion of nonprofits. How is the relationship between neighborhood development organizations and neighborhood disadvantage dependent on race, resources, and residential mobility? The answer to this question is vital as cities attempt to correct structural inequalities and rely on nonprofit organizations in their plans.

For example, Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is attempting to tackle two persistent, decades-old issues within Chicago: violence and concentrated poverty. Throughout her first two years in office, nonprofit leaders have been meeting with and standing at her side. In February, before the onset of Covid-19 in the US, Chicago’s city leaders and nonprofit organizational representatives met to discuss plans to reinvest in long divested corridors in the West and South sides of the city, hoping to spur job growth and help long-isolated communities escape concentrated poverty. More recently, as Chicago has seen a continued increase in gun violence, Lightfoot has responded to calls with a formalized plan to lean on nonprofit organizations to help reduce violence, though the plan so far has not included significant steps away from traditional policing.

Continue reading “Neighborhood Development Organizations – Tackling Neighborhood Disadvantage at the Intersection of Race and Resource Inequity”