Social ROI: A Social Entrepreneurship Blog

BusinessWeek reviews seven organizations that provide tools and services to analyze charities.

Enabling social change through analytics

Reading about Analytics X and thought I’d share here:

The Analytics X Prize is an ongoing contest to apply analytics, modeling, and statistics to solve the social problems that affect our cities. It combines the fields of statistics, mathematics, and social science to understand the root causes of dysfunction in our neighborhoods. Understanding these relationships and discovering the most highly correlated variables allows us to deploy our limited resources more effectively and target the variables that will have the greatest positive impact on improvement.

Current Contest – 2010 – Predicting Homicides in Philadelphia

Philadelphia is a city with 5.8 million people spread out over 47 zip codes and, like any major city, it has its share of crime. The goal of the Analytics X Prize is to use statistical techniques and any data sets you can find to predict where crime, specifically homicides, will occur in the city. The ability to accurately predict where crime is likely to occur allows us to deploy our limited city resources more effectively. Full rules can be found on the Rules & FAQ page.

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Browse For A Cause is a browser add-on that collects affiliate revenue (usually 3-5%) from sites like Amazon to help charities. For example, if you buy a $20 DVD, the affiliate revenue equates to about $1 which is donated to the charity of your choice. You can support as many charities as you’d like, and revenue will be split between them.

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In the United States, cumulative online donations to charities could hit more than $4 billion during the holidays, according to a survey released Tuesday by marketing firm Convio. More than than 63 percent of those surveyed said they plan to donate money via the the Internet over the holiday season (November 1 through December 31, 2009), up from 51 percent in 2008.

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Vittana, which beat out such well-known charities as DonorsChoose and people like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, is building a student loan business for microfinance institutions that cater to poor people in the developing world.

It uses a model similar to that of Kiva.org, a nonprofit organization that funnels loans to individual borrowers through microfinance institutions. The method is to solicit individual lenders for money that will back loans to young adults seeking college educations.

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Charities are tracking their users in social networks, virtual realms and other corners of the online universe to raise money by mixing the efficiency of life online with opportunities to promote brands and have a bit of fun. No one is certain how online giving will evolve, but some campaigns are reporting sizable fund-raising and a deeper and continuing connection with donors.

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A couple of nonprofits are using technology to make foodie philanthropy easier this holiday season. First, for every $50 you donate via Fresh Direct’s website, Robin Hood will deliver a turkey and fixings to a food organization such as the Food Bank For New York City (Robin Hood is the bank’s largest supplier). Second, City Harvest has released its annual Great Food, Good Hearts guide of restaurants that support the organization. This year, you can search the 160 venues via your cell phone, by texting “city harvest” and any address to 69866 (you’ll then get a text back listing the closest restaurants). If you prefer the old-fashioned way (or the old new-fashioned way or whatever), you can view a PDF of the guide here.

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