Social impact camp, number one
Last week saw the very first Social Impact Camp, which I was lucky enough to get myself along to.
It brought together people from all sorts of groups, from not-for-profit organisations like the Parent Pupil Partnership, regional government agency Social Enterprise London and social business consultants like Rob Greenland
Why? To begin to collaboratively work out how to better demonstrate and measure social impact – something wikipedia describes as: “In business and government policy, social impact refers to how the organisation’s actions affect the surrounding community”.
Started by Ben Matthews, founder of the amazing volunteer-led communications agency Bright One, it’s been inspired by Measurement Camp – the monthly meetup to discuss measurement and social media.
Social Impact Camp follows a similar format (brief presentations, breakout groups and general discussion) but also stems from a similar need.
Measurement Camp came about (kicked off by Will back in 2008) because those working in social media knew that what they were doing had value and an impact, but that there are ways to improve how success is tracked and measured – and that sharing knowledge is going to get benefit everyone.
It was clear from this meetup that organisations working to create a positive social impact feel the same about what they’re doing.
Even though it was the first event, with a group of people who’d never met before, the discussion was lively, interesting and useful.
We talked about the challenges in aligning the reporting needs of your stakeholders with what actually indicates real-world success, how putting a set of metrics in place can risk inadvertently molding your activity to fit, and the problems in consistently measuring things like the changes in someone’s perception of their opportunities in life.
I went along partly because we’re working on a project where metrics for success are going to be based on social capital and social return on investment (which deserves a post in itself) and because it’s going to help bring new ways to measure value beyond the bottom line to the third sector and public sector clients we work with
If I took one thing away from the evening it’s that measuring this stuff is clearly complicated, straddling quantitative and qualitative, online, offline and the inner world of individuals, but that if we can better demonstrate the value and ongoing need for people, projects and organisatons that add value to the world around us, then we’ll generate even more support for them.
Can’t wait for the next one.
Max St John wrote this on 28.01.10 – 5 comments
It's filed in the Events & conferences, NixonMcInnes, measurement box
On January 29th, 2010 at 1:55 am, Alan M Jackson responded:
You may be interested in Crisis Camp London. It’s one of a number of BarCamp / Hackathon style events that have spontaneously erupted across the globe in support of Haiti.
We’re looking for coders, web designers, user experience people, project managers or anyone with relevant aid experience to come along.
The camps will run every Saturday this month. The next one is on the 30th of January at the London Knowledge Lab.
To find out more visit the London page on the Crisis Commons wiki: http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Crisis_Camp_London
It’s a fun event and a chance to use your technical skills to help the relief effort in Haiti. You’ll also get free pizza courtesy of Domino’s.
Hope to see you there!
hashtag: #crisiscampLDN
On January 30th, 2010 at 4:45 am, Tweets that mention Social impact camp, number one @ NixonMcInnes: Social media goodness. Translated. Created. Delivered. -- Topsy.com responded:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ben Matthews, dan mcquillan, NixonMcInnes, max st john, max st john and others. max st john said: @benrmatthews finally published a post about it – feel free to contribute/haul me up on anything if you have time :) http://bit.ly/9UjPcR [...]
On February 2nd, 2010 at 8:20 pm, Ben Matthews responded:
Thanks for the fantastic write up, Max, and great to see you at the first event.
The next one has just been announced here: http://socialimpactcamp.wikidot.com/events
I see you signed up already, so hopefully will be able to catch up with you then!
On February 9th, 2010 at 5:02 pm, max responded:
@alan thanks for the heads up, sounds really interesting – I’ve been out of the country for the past couple of weeks but see there’s another next Saturday. Hopefully I can get along.
@ben yup, wanted to get in early! Looking forward to it – see you then :-)
On March 4th, 2010 at 1:23 pm, Sign up for the next Social Impact Camp | Bright One responded:
[...] To get a feel for what has happened at past events, take a look at the fantastic blog posts by Rob Greenland of The Social Business and Max St John of Nixon McInnes. [...]