Advisory board

We have countless informal advisers, from customers to clients, investors, and family and friends. We value the support we receive and are always learning from our partners who help us improve as a social enterprise and better achieve our social mission.Today I am pleased to announce the next step in Idealistics's growth. We have begun assembling a formal Advisory Board. I am honored to introduce our first two Advisory Board members, Dr. Rodney Brooks and Dick Guthrie.

Rodney Brooks is currently Panasonic Professor of Robotics in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also founder and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp. Dr. Brooks, like all of us here at Idealistics, works to combine business, technology, and academics with the aim of creating positive change in the world. Dick Guthrie has spent his entire career in non-profit and government human services. Over the course of his career, Dick has worked at the Boys and Girls Club and spent several years as Director of Human Services for the City of Claremont until his retirement in 2006. Dick brings considerable management experience and human services insight to the Idealistics Advisory Board. I am excited to have Dick and Rodney joining Idealistics as advisers. I look forward to learning from their experiences and working with them to solve community crises and enhance social services through our technologies.

Making Evaluations Easy

In a presentation at the Social for Social Innovation at Stanford University (the audio file is available here), Dr. Alana Conner argued for fewer and better evaluations of social service agencies. Her argument hinges on the fact that good evaluations are hard to do. She points out the importance (and difficulty) of finding a control group for an agency's clients. That is, a group of individuals who are as similar as possible to the clients but who do not receive services from the agency. Comparing the difference in outcomes between the agency's clients and the control group yields the impact of the agency's work. Rick Aubry of Rubicon Programs, one of her co-presenters at the lecture, goes on to point out that evaluations require a serious commitment at all levels of the agency, as intakes and follow-ups must be designed to collect data for the evaluation.

Conner's conclusion, then, is that evaluations should only be done on programs that seem deserving (i.e., programs that clients seem to like or other agencies are interested in copying). While this follows logically from her and her colleagues' arguments that evaluations are difficult, the thesis seems unsatisfying. Even if a program does not seem deserving of an evaluation, how undeserving is it? Could it be improved with just a few tweaks? Is it an agency's worst program (should it be cut) or is it somewhere in the middle?

On the other hand, if we do want to do large numbers of evaluations, we need to address her points and make evaluations easier. How can we do this?

Access to Technology

A recently published Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) report provides some sobering statistics on information technology access of low-income and minority Californians. The PPIC reports:

Less than half of California Latinos (48%) have home computers compared to about eight in 10 or more for whites (86%), Asians (84%), and blacks (79%). Just four in 10 Latinos (40%) have Internet access and a third (34%) a broadband connection at home.




Among households with incomes under $40,000, half have home computers, but only four in 10 (40%) have home Internet access and just a third (33%) have broadband.

On face one might think Idealistics, as a technology social enterprise that aims to help those in need with web based information systems, would have trouble reaching the populations mentioned by PPIC above. When I give presentations I often get community organizations rightly pointing out to me that a lot of the people we are trying to help either don't have access to, or don't know how to use computers.

Non-Profit Executive Pay - Inputs and Outcomes

I’m sure you all are quite familiar with the debate over non-profit executive compensation and whether or not non-profit professionals should be paid salaries more similar to their for-profit counterparts. This post in the Do Good Well blog draws attention to what matters most when thinking about employee compensation in a non-profit. The blogger writes:

The mindset that a good nonprofit is any nonprofit that spend[s] less than 10% of their donations on overhead seems well intentioned but completely wrong-headed to me. The point is impact. The point is whether or not you achieve your mission. Dollars, as Jim Collins points out in his “Good to Great: Social Sector monograph” are inputs not outputs for most nonprofits, and therefore a dangerous way to rate the quality of an organization.

Indeed the most important thing to any social service agency is the output, the social value each organization provides per dollar. Social output should be at the core of any social enterprise, non-profit or otherwise. Here at Idealistics, we center our success around our outputs, which for our agency is the social impact of our services and technologies. With our core mission being to help resolve community crises, my focus as a manager is on assembling the best talent I can to produce the maximum amount of social good possible.

Dependent Parolees in Pomona

Over the course of several months, from December, 2007 to early March, 2008 Idealistics partnered with the City of Pomona’s Planning and Housing Department to design and administer a survey of its parolee population. During the two months of survey administration, City of Pomona staff collected 106 surveys. In a report analyzing the results, Idealistics found that the parolee population leans heavily on friends and family for support.

A friend's or family member's home was the most popular choice of living situation at 38% of the sample. 20.8% of the sampled parolees use a friend’s or family member’s vehicle as their primary means of transportation. In these cases, parolees used friends and family members to meet their basic needs instead of using the city's social service system. A large proportion of parolees also used friends and family to meet food and clothing needs. It seems that