I am Phil Halbrook and I would like to share with you information about TRASI – a great tool to help evaluators seeking to measure social impact. The issue of measuring social impact is a hot button one right now and the TRASI database and website is extremely useful.
Rad Resource – TRASI: TRASI is “Tools and Resources for Assessing Social Impact” and it is from the Foundation Center. TRASI has over 150 indexed tools, each with a description of what it does and what entity developed it. Full disclosure – all of the resources there aren’t tools per se, they include best practice guides, methodological guides, and what we might more traditionally consider to be a tool. TRASI also includes a blog and discussion groups where you can discuss the resources available there or broader issues related to assessing social impact.
Rad Resources – Examples from the TRASI Database: So, what’s there?
Campaign Champions Data Collection Tool from the Annie E Casey Foundation: “This is a tool that measures strengthened base of public support. This form tracks and measures the number of “champions” (people who take actions to advance the public will) engaged and the actions these champions undertake as a part of the Born Learning campaign.”
Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best: “This best practice provides guidelines on values…, effectiveness …, ethics …, and commitment … criteria for evaluating philanthropy.”
Interrupted Time Series Designs [Guide]: “This is an observational method that measures impact of education programs in cases where data before the implementation of the program is available. This method compares the data from before the implementation to the same data afterwards to tease out a trend in achievement.”
And 100+ others
Hot Tip – TRASI on Twitter: You can follow TRASI on Twitter at @FCAtlanta. This apst week, on November 14th, they held their first ever tweet chat on social impact assessment using the hashtag #socimp. If you are on Twitter, the conversation is still going – just search for the hashtag. Not on Twitter? No problem. This link http://hashtags.org/socimp will take you access to a record of the discussion to date with the #socimp hashtag – check it out for insights and resources.
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