fbpx

Written Articles

thumb
Blog

Amplifying Impact; Our Latest Whitepaper

Social entrepreneurship has a proven track record of helping to increase climate resilience among those already living in poverty. Miller Center accelerates promising social enterprises to optimize their impact and business performance potential. That said, it’s quite difficult to measure the impact of acceleration on an enterprise’s growth because we can’t observe what would’ve happened to that same enterprise without the acceleration program. Yet, knowing the impact of acceleration has important implications for the ecosystem.

In an effort to move beyond case studies and anecdotal data, Miller Center has leveraged data and creative research methodologies to try to measure the impact of its accelerator with funding support from Chevron. Using the 2021 Climate Resilience Asia Pacific Accelerator cohort as a guide, we created a comparable cohort from our alumni database and measured their growth since graduating. As Miller Center gets more rigorous in our impact measurement and data collection, we will be able to publish more data driven research that validates the impact and potential of acceleration and social entrepreneurship. Furthermore, in three years we will be able to check if the current 2021 Climate Resilience Asia Pacific Accelerator program actually scaled at the predicted rate of this paper!

imm-lms-artwork
Blog

Meet Our Third Impact Measurement and Management Cohort!

Last year Miller Center piloted a new program to alumni enterprises focused on Impact Measurement and Management in partnership with Sopact. 14 entrepreneurs participated in this pilot program where they refined their Theory of Change, selected and prioritized key outcomes, aligned indicators to impact frameworks, designed stakeholder surveys, collected data, and created interactive dashboards that showcased their work. One of the graduates of the program, Smart Havens Africa, took their learnings even further and published their first Impact Learnings Report with the data and results gathered in the program.

After the success of these pilots, I am pleased to share our third cohort of social entrepreneurs ready to roll up their sleeves and dig into their impact measurement and management strategies. We are welcoming a cohort of 8 Miller Center Alumni social enterprises all of which are locally-led and over half of them are women-led. Read more about each enterprise below.

In this new edition of the program we will also be welcoming Santa Clara University students who will be interning with this cohort and have the opportunity to apply some of their data visualization and SQL skills to support the entrepreneurs in building their impact dashboards.

email-articles
Blog

Learnings from Our First Impact Model Pilot Cohort

It’s been one month since we launched the first Impact Model Pilot cohort. As we launch the second Impact Model Pilot cohort with six more social enterprises, we reflect on two key learnings so far from the first cohort:

  1. Measuring social impact is challenging: Start by asking some fundamental questions. What problems are you solving? Who are you solving them for? What are you doing to solve the problems?
  2. Impact Measurement and Management needs continuous learning and evolution: One mentor in the program put it well and said, “Yes, thinking of the whole process as iterative works well. When we changed from viewing our Theory of Change as final to thinking of it as the first iteration, we were able to move forward. Applying this to each step in the process is a good philosophy.”

Learn more about the 6 social enterprises in the second pilot cohort running from September – December 2021: