Much like the long-running debate in the nonprofit world about how to measure a charity’s performance, a movement is under way to figure out how to evaluate whether investments that seek both financial and social returns are making a difference.

The absence of common standards means that investors can’t compare the social and environmental benefits of different investment opportunities, said Antony Bugg-Levine, a managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation. Even measures as simple as the number of jobs created through an investment might be counted differently from one social-investment fund to another.

For example, one fund might count only the number of full-time jobs created, while another fund might also include part-time or seasonal jobs.

Rockefeller has been working with the Acumen Fund, B Lab, Deloitte, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and others in the field to develop a...

The question of just how much the financial crisis has opened mainstream investors’ eyes to the potential of investments that combine both financial and social returns has permeated discussions at the conference.

“I just had this feeling that people with fiduciary responsibilities, asset owners would kind of step back and say, ‘Let me get this straight. My microfinance bond gave me 7 percent, but I just lost 30 percent of my portfolio with traditional assets,’” Jed Emerson, a managing director of Uhuru Capital Management, in New York, told conference participants.

But, he said, in the conversations that he has had with institutional investors over the last six to nine months, it hasn’t seemed like the critical evaluation of traditional investing approaches he expected has taken place.

“I was struck by how fast these folks just ran right back to the same wealth advisers, to the...

The Calvert Giving Fund works much like other donor-advised funds, but with a twist –- the assets that donors contribute to set up their funds are invested in companies and other efforts that promote the social good.

“We believe that the philanthropic gifts that they’ve given to the donor-advised fund really need to go to work as soon as they are contributed,” says Shari Berenbach, chief executive of the Calvert Foundation, in Bethesda, Md., which runs the fund.

Started in 2001, the Calvert Giving Fund has always given donors the choice of investing money held in donor-advised funds in socially and environmentally responsible mutual funds run by the Calvert Group and in Community Investment Notes issued by the foundation.

The notes act like the program-related investments that foundations make. Money invested in the notes is lent to nonprofit organizations to build low-cost...

Measurements and evaluation will play an important role as government and the nonprofit world work together to identify and expand the best solutions to the country’s most pressing social problems, Sonal Shah, director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, told conference participants.

“We want to scale what works,” she said. “We want to be able to define our outcomes and be accountable for the results.”

But good data on programs’ social impact are more than just a way to compare various approaches; it also allows organizations to learn and continue to refine their programs, Ms. Shah said.

Organizations also need to be able to talk openly about their failures and the challenges they face, she said. Not being able to discuss problems leads to “perverse incentives” such as evaluating programs to show whether money was used effectively rather than...

Putting for-profit investment capital to work in ways that benefit society has the potential to unlock substantial sums of money to tackle the world’s problems, says Antony Bugg-Levine, a managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation, in New York. In time, he says, the scale could dwarf anything the nonprofit world could have dreamed possible.

But, he says, the goal of mission investing is not to supplant the efforts of philanthropy and government, but instead to complement them.

Using for-profit capital to achieve social and environmental ends, he says, allows scarce charitable dollars to go where they are most needed.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Bugg-Levine talked about why mission investing matters, and used the example of a school-finance company in India to show how harnessing for-profit capital allows government and philanthropy to focus on problems markets...

VillageReach, a nonprofit organization in Seattle, took a novel approach to trying to improve the health of people living in remote areas of Northern Mozambique. It started a propane-distribution company.

In 2002, the charity started VidaGas with the country’s Ministry of Health as its first and, at the time, only customer. With a reliable source of energy, clinics were better able to keep vaccinations cold, sterilize medical equipment, and offer night-time birthing services.

In five year’s time, the percentage of young children in the region vaccinated for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis climbed from 69 to 95 percent.

The company quickly began to expand its customer base to include hotels, restaurants, hospitals, small businesses, and eventually residential households. The business has had the added benefits of spurring economic developments and reducing the use of charcoal a...

San Francisco

More than 800 investors, entrepreneurs, financiers, foundation executives, donors, and nonprofit officials have gathered here for Social Capital Markets 2009, a meeting that conference organizers describe as being “at the intersection of money and meaning.”

Discussions will focus on the range of ways that investment, enterprise, and business-minded approaches to giving are being married with a desire to do social good in areas such as health care, education, and the environment.

Scheduled speakers include Sonal Shah, director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation; Shari Berenbach, chief executive of Calvert Foundation; and Dave Chen, founder of Equilibrium Capital Group, a firm that invests in companies that focus on environmentally friendly building, resource management, and the food-supply chain.

We will post updates here...

Technology wasn’t just the subject of conversation of the Nonprofit Technology Conference. It played a role in just about every aspect of the meeting.

People who wanted to pose a question to a plenary speaker had to submit them online. Other participants voted to determine which questions would be asked.

On Monday, the first day of sessions, 400 evaluations were submitted via text message, and participants sent 3,800 conference-related Twitter messages.

The volume of online activity was so high that for a period of time it brought down the hotel’s wireless network.

Monitoring what people are saying online about an organization is critical, Carie Lewis, Internet Marketing Manager at the Humane Society of the United States, in Washington, told participants at a session on social media.

Charities, she said, should be tracking:

• Their organization’s name.
• Any acronyms associated with the group — the Humane Society monitors HSUS.
• The names of prominent employees and spokesmen.
• Any current campaigns or issues associated with the organizations.
• Other organizations that work on the same cause — the “competition.”
• “Detractors” — people who are known to be critical of the organization
• “Influencers” — people who shape he opinions of others.

“Detractors are people who can’t stand us, and there’s really nothing we can do about it,” said Ms. Lewis. “But we still have to pay attention to them. Our influencers are people who we’ve identified...

Once a nonprofit organization has started using social-networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, maintaining the group’s presence on multiple sites becomes increasingly time consuming, Jordan Dossett, creative director of Antharia, a technology company in Lanham, Md., said in a session at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.

“Basically, you go nuts, and want to jump out a window,” she quipped.

But, fortunately, she said, there are free and low-cost tools that can make updating the sites easier.

Ping.fm, a free service, lets people update all of their social networks at the same time.

Ms. Dossett said that the first thing she did when she arrived for the session is send a “ping” to say she was in the room and it was “T minus 15 minutes” until the start of the presentation.

“When I did that, it updated my Facebook page, my Twitter page, my LinkedIn page, my Plurk page, all of...