Global Blog > Industry News Archives

By: Maria Nardell, onPhilanthropy, 11/29/06

... First of all, it is a challenge to develop a method of benchmarking second-grade reading improvements and translating that output (e.g., the number of students who pass a reading diagnostic test) into terms equivalent to the given input (e.g., volunteer time). Second, even if such a formula were devised, Thompson observed, how would one compare the impact of education programs in places as diverse as Vermont and India?

Most companies rely upon their nonprofit partners for the statistics to measure social impact. As with corporate giving programs, however, there is no single standard by which nonprofits gather, analyze or present that data, and so Thompson would question a company that states it has exact data detailing the impact of its giving. ...

According to Farron, “You can look at social return in a couple of ways.” One way is non-monetary. That is, social change is measured by quantity times quality, allowing for “customizable social units of outcome,” such as the number of lives saved by a vaccine or the number of people educated through a scholarship program. The other way is to think about social return in a monetary sense. The socio-economic value of corporate giving investments can consist of the money society saves or the increased number of people contributing toward the tax base. Some companies also measure the market value of their investments, although Farron points out that most companies don’t accurately determine the percentage of goods and services actually being used. (For example, brand-new donated computers sitting in an organization’s closet don’t do anyone any good.) ...

http://www.onphilanthropy.com/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6845&JServSessionIdr011=lyn38jsak1.app6b

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 By GUY CHAZAN, WSJ, October 19, 2006; Page A6

MOSCOW -- Hundreds of foreign human-rights groups and other organizations operating in Russia may have to suspend operations because they are entangled in red tape from a controversial new law.

A law passed earlier this year required all such outside organizations to reregister with the government. The law vastly increased state supervision of outside groups, and was condemned by several Western leaders as a threat to Russia's embryonic civil society.

Now many are caught in Russia's bureaucracy. While 175 foreign nongovernmental organizations submitted documentation on time, only 87 had their applications processed by the target date, said a spokesman for Russia's Federal Registration Service, or FRS. That represents a fraction of the 400-plus such groups active in Russia.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116121712420397112.html?mod=world_news_whats_news

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CIUDAD DEL VATICANO/MÉXICO D.F., jueves, 13 julio 2006 (ZENIT.org-El Observador).- México es el país de América Latina que más ayuda económicamente a la labor de la Iglesia universal.

De acuerdo con el informe económico presentado esta semana por la Prefectura de Asuntos Económicos de la Santa Sede –que preside el cardenal Sergio Sebastiani--, la aportación mexicana se sitúa detrás de la de los Estados Unidos, Italia, Alemania, Francia, España, Irlanda, Canadá y Corea, y por encima de la de Austria.

El país azteca ocupa la novena posición tanto en la aportación al «Óbolo de San Pedro» --para sostener la misión apostólica y caritativa del Papa--, como en la que prevé el canon 1271 del Código de Derecho Canónico que refleja la aportación de los obispos en la colecta realizada en sus respectivas diócesis para sostener, en la medida de sus posibilidades, a la Iglesia en su misión universal.

Fuentes eclesiásticas mexicanas consultadas, mostraron su alegría ante esta noticia --difundida por la agencia informativa «Notimex»—, pues en años anteriores, el país, que cuenta con cerca de 90 millones de católicos, no ocupaba lugares destacados en la ayuda a la labor de la Iglesia.

Sin duda las cinco visitas que realizó durante su pontificado Juan Pablo II a México han motivado a los fieles a redoblar su aportación económica al Vaticano, hasta volverla la novena del mundo, según destacó el cardenal Sebastiani.

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Concurso del programa de pequeñas donaciones del Banco Mundial Bajo el nombre de "Promoviendo la Transparencia", el Banco Mundial abre la última fecha para el concurso de proyectos que cuenta con 90.000 dólares para financiar iniciativas de organizaciones de la sociedad civil de Argentina, Paraguay y Uruguay que presenten ideas innovadoras y fomenten la participación y el compromiso de la sociedad para promover la transparencia y la responsabilidad social.

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Fondo del BID anuncia programa de apoyo a investigación sobre remesas Llamado a concurso para disertaciones doctorales, tesis de maestría y trabajos académicos El Fondo Multilateral de Inversiones anunció  un programa para alentar la investigación académica sobre el potencial de desarrollo de las remesas. La competencia está abierta a autores de disertaciones doctorales y tesis de maestrías en universidades de los 47 países miembros del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo.
http://info.asociacionenlaces.org/archives/009254.html

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William Easterly, author of The White Man's Burden: Why The West’s Efforts To Aid The Rest Have Done So Much Ill And So Little Good, has added his voice to the growing demand for independent evaluation of foreign aid. ... Easterly said ... that development assistance lacks CIAO: Customer feedback, Incentives, Accountability, and, therefore, good Outcomes. The solution, he said, is independent evaluation.

"We need independent evaluation of foreign aid. It’s amazing that we’ve gone a half century without this," he said. Truly independent evaluation of aid would "give feedback to see which interventions are working and give incentives to aid staff to find things that work,� he said. As a result, aid agencies would “start specializing much more in individual, monitorable tasks for which they can be held accountable.�

... Easterly contrasted two approaches. First, an ineffective planners' approach that he said lacks the knowledge and motivation to achieve overambitious, arbitrary targets. Second, what he regards as a more constructive searchers' approach: individuals always on the lookout for piecemeal improvements to poor peoples' well-being, with a system to get more aid resources to those who find things that work.

http://www.cgdev.org/content/general/detail/6926title=

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... Marcos Kisil, from IDIS, argued that knowing how investments were being made was even more important than knowing how much was being invested. ‘In Latin America, there is a tradition of charity, rather than of social investment by the private sector,’ he said. ‘The issue is how much actually goes into social transformation, instead of maintaining the status quo, as is the case with charity.’ This was echoed by Laura Jimenez, who remarked that ‘social change is not a direct function of the amount invested’.

Leonardo Yánez, from the Bernard van Leer Foundation, highlighted the need to ‘build interfaces of collaboration not only between donors, but also with the beneficiaries of grantmaking, such as governments, local foundations and NGOs’.

Things to avoid

One of the discussions in the meeting produced a list of don'ts when investing in community development, a field in which many of the Brazilian organizations work. The list might be applied to several social projects in Brazil:

• Don’t act alone.
• Don’t consider only the short or medium term. Social change takes time.
• Don’t work only with the government. For project sustainability, it is necessary to involve civil society organizations as well.
• Don’t foster dependency.
• Don’t design too strict or fixed action plans.
• Don’t disregard or treat with disrespect the different timescales of the different communities.
• Don’t bypass external assessment processes, no matter how costly and potentially contentious they may be.

The outcomes of the meeting, as well as the final results of the survey, will be presented at the Network annual meeting in May during the EFC Conference in Brussels. ...

http://www.allavida.org/alliance/axmar06f.html 

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Alexandria,  VA,  United States,  December 5, 2005  — (Alexandria, VA) – Nearly 4,000 fundraisers from 20 different countries are expected to attend the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ (AFP) International Conference on Fundraising, the largest gathering of professional fundraisers in the world, held April 2-5,2006, at the Georgia World Conference Center in Atlanta.

http://conference.afpnet.org/news.cfm?id=1705&action=1 

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By Daniel Yoffe and Brad Henderson

(March 13, 2006) During a session at the recent 2^nd Hemipsheric Congress on Fundraising in Mexico City, participants discussed some of the key barriers to achieving success in fundraising in Latin America...

http://www.afpnet.org/ka/ka-3.cfm?content_item_id=23523&folder_id=2827 

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From Pres. Bush's address to the Second White House National Conference on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, March 9, 2006

... a recent survey of our Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, ... of 20 large corporate foundations, found that only about 6 percent of their grants went to faith-based groups. ...

I would urge our corporate foundations to reach beyond the norm, to look for those social entrepreneurs who haven't been recognized heretofore, to continue to find people that are running programs that are making a significant difference in people's lives.

When we studied 50 large foundations, we found that one in five prohibited faith organizations from receiving funding for social service programs. In other words, there's a prohibition against funding faith programs from certain foundations in the country. I would hope they would revisit their charters. I would hope they'd take a look at achieving social objectives -- make the priority the achievement of certain social objectives before they would make the decision to exclude some who are achieving incredible progress on behalf of our country....

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/03/20060309-5.html

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