Guest post by Laura Callanan, Consultant, Social Sector Office, McKinsey and Company

In 2010, McKinsey & Company released the findings from our Learning for Social Impact initiative. The importance of a learning culture was highlighted as critical to making social impact assessment successful within an organization.

Organizations with a learning culture...

• Value honest appraisal, open dissent, and constructive feedback
• Undertake intelligent risk-taking in pursuit of insight and impact
• Engage in strategic decision-making
• Exhibit curiosity; seek innovation and excellence
• Pursue informed exploration with an orientation to the future
• Consider the relevant context, and make difficult decisions based on evidence and new understanding
• Provide a space where staff can share stories and lessons from their least successful efforts; what happened, why it happened, and what they will do differently next time

Recently, we were invited to work with GlobalGiving whose mission is to catalyze a global market for ideas, information, and money that democratizes aid and philanthropy. GlobalGiving connects donors directly to social, economic development, and environmental projects around the world through an online platform that allows donations to be sent safely and securely. Since its founding in 2002, GlobalGiving has raised $63M from more than 250,000 donors and supported nearly 1,900 organizations in 129 countries.

Our goals were to return to GlobalGiving’s original aspirations, which focused on social change at the community level, and to build upon GlobalGiving’s existing business metrics to develop an equally rigorous and useful way to assess social impact.
While it took a number of discussions to arrive at a specific set of metrics and a feasible implementation plan to begin measuring social impact at GlobalGiving, the process was made remarkably easier because GlobalGiving already had a strong learning culture in place. This means there is both an orientation towards experimenting and communicating, and the processes and feedback loops which translate these cultural norms into decisions and actions.

For example, since GlobalGiving already has in place semi-annual and annual planning and review sessions, already ranks the organizations receiving funding, already has a new hire training program and already schedules brown bag lunches on important topics, it is relatively easy to add social impact assessment into the discussions, criteria, curricula, and agendas. In another organization, creating a system for measuring social impact would require building from scratch every element of the system.  For GlobalGiving, it has simply meant building onto a strong system a layer focused on social impact.

But this shouldn’t come as a surprise. One of GlobalGiving’s core values is Listen, Act, Learn, Repeat. Talk about a learning culture.