Saket Vora

On Monday, I attended a panel discussion on strategic philanthropy, held because of  a career fair for philanthropy. The panel featured Ivan Barkhorn, a partner with Redstone Strategy Group; Smita Singh, Director of the Hewlett Foundation’s Global Development Program; Barry Newstead, The Bridgespan Group; and Paul Brest, Director of the Hewlett Foundation. Here are some notes I jotted down:

Barkhorn:

• There has been a movement in the past 6-8 years of ‘strategic philanthropy’. Philanthropic contributions have an admittedly poor track record at actually having impact or significant ROI considering the massive amounts of money that are moved around. The ‘new way’ is to harness metrics and analytics towards measuring impact.
• This approach requires clarity of goals, or else no strategy will achieve desired results.
• Evidence-based approach needs empirical data.
• Foundations must be cognizant of varying risk/return profiles. High risk/high return — big issues like global warming, global poverty. Low risk / low return — soup kitchens. Each as a role.

Singh:

• Three main intellectual challenges in philanthropy
  •  What are the problems in the world
  • Why do they exist
  • What do to about them; more specifically, what is the role of private money? We aren’t states.
• Must outline and be clear about goals. One of their goals is to improve income levels for those making under $2/day. The next step is then to develop theories of change. What sort of interventions can effect change?
• Care must be made to identify the critical drivers of the problems you wish to tackle in order to ask the right questions and implement the appropriate metrics needed to evaluate your interventions.
  • For instance, we’ve seen 50M increase in school enrollment for children in sub-Saharan Africa, but there is no literacy achieved by grade 4. 50% of the government school students in India lack basic math skills such as adding two numbers in third grade. Was the goal to increase student enrollment or to increase literacy/math skills in children?
• In medicine, it was be absurd to roll out a drug to a large population without smaller scale, highly monitored and studied clinical trials to determine efficacy. However, this is done all the time in development programs! Why?
• Finding data can be hard. What are useful proxies for key indicators?

Newstead:

• Implementing metrics doesn’t have to be hard. It does require a focus and a willingless to study the problem. Example:
  • 6-12 grade school in Houston. 95% Hispanic, 4% black. 90% under the poverty line. One metric: how many kids go on to college?
  • They wanted to know what were the key variables that determine success.
  • They were tracking the number of 12th graders who went on to college, but weren’t tracking those sixth graders who then went to college. So they went through the list and tracked down the progress of every sixth grader and figured out when/if that student dropped out, etc.
  • A big part is knowing the right questions to ask and where to look.

Much of the talking was for the benefit of those seeking careers in philanthropy, so they stressed the ablity to think analytically, the importance of field experience, etc. I was a bit unsatisfied though. The speakers had spoken about research they had done in determining the key drivers for poverty reduction in development projects, of processes they had worked on or determining the size of grants for field trials. But they never touched upon what specifically these all were. During the open mic Q&A period, I went and asked them about this. “I have friends who realize the importance of metrics for measuring and evaluating impact, and they are working in many fields from agrobusiness to public health to education. A common refrain I hear is that they don’t know what the research shows regarding key metrics. Where specifically can we find the results you just mentioned? What journals or reports or websites?”

At first they didn’t quite understand, so I tried being more direct. Ms. Singh said that there is a working group called the International Association for Impact Assessment that is trying to bring together all the organizations working in this space and doing meta-analyses in various sectors to determine the best practices for impact metrics. She also mentioned a book, Millions Saved by Ruth Levine which is about the publc health sector.

A good start, I suppose.