A recent experiment about basic income in Finland has all sides of the movement debating the results....
Category: Case Studies
Using AI to Map Better Distribution of Social Goods
The effectiveness of social goods often comes down to distribution. Can you put social goods in the hand of the people who need and want them? This is a huge challenge in the informal settlements in the world’s urban areas. A team of university researchers, government agencies, and software companies are showing how AI...
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Six Characteristics of Sustainable Organizations
Someone once asked business strategist and lapsed biologist Martin Reeves a simple question: How can I build a business that lasts 100 years?...
Designing Bright Spot Solutions For Reducing Teen Drug Use
Iceland used to have the worst teenagers in Europe: smoking, drinking, getting high, staying out late. What’s a country to do?...
Designing a Credit Market for Stormwater Management
Heavy rains and flood waters flow across the impervious surfaces of roads and parking lots. That flow pushes pollution on those surfaces–plastic bottles, cigarette butts, motor oil–into stormwater management systems. That pollution then dumps into lakes and streams. This system is how so much plastic ends up in our oceans....
Innovative Pricing Turns Plastic Into Transit
It’s a different way to pay with plastic — bottles instead of credit cards. Cities like Beijing, Istanbul, Sydney, and Surabaya let you pay public transit fares with recyclable plastic. Innovative transit pricing is one way that public and social sector marketers achieve multiple goals at once....
Estonia Runs On Digital Government
I visited Estonia in the mid-1990s. Back then, I said it would be fascinating to return in 20 years and see what changed....
Case Study in Nonprofit Healthcare: Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative
For social goods like health care, the buyer and the end consumer are often two different parties. In much of health care, an insurance company or a government agency is the buyer, while the individual patient is the end consumer. At least in the United States, for-profit medicine companies exploit this split. They charge...
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Distributing Help to the Homeless
How do you deliver help to homeless people with no fixed address and little to no money? ...
Using Social ROI for Market Entry Decisions
If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you are looking for ways to increase your impact. Social return on investment, or social ROI, lets you objectively define and measure your impact. Once you can define and measure impact, use that ability to identify communities to serve. Decisions about who and where you choose to...
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