Social impact insights, backed by research.

Volunteering may look different now than it did before the pandemic. After being forced to continue operations remotely for the better part of 2020 and 2021, some organizations are now leaning into the use of virtual volunteering as a way of gathering volunteers regardless of physical location. But how does this influence the ways that volunteers give their time? And how does this affect the “why” behind volunteering? Volunteering rates

Rethinking Evaluations:Navigating services related to health– housing, employment, transportation, etc.– can be extremely difficult. That’s why state leaders in North Carolina created NCCARE360, a network that provides public access to resources and aids organizations in collaborating on referrals. As the first statewide coordinated care network, NCCARE360 has onboarded over 2,500 organizations and helped over 42,000 users. But how can state leaders even get started creating a network like NCCARE360? Medicaid

Accepting Tradeoffs:Effective coordinated care networks require numerous moving parts to work together. Managers of these systems must acknowledge the inevitability of issues in their systems. When things go off course, it’s essential to recognize tradeoffs. Some metrics can be optimized at the expense of others. One of the main tradeoffs discovered by researchers in the IBM report is the interplay between accuracy versus efficiency. For coordinated care networks, better accuracy leads

Systems of care allow clients to seamlessly receive care from multiple health and human service providers. They improve access to care and encourage accountability for health and human services organizations. Systems of care are defined as referral systems across health and human service agencies supported by technological capital (e.g., community referral technologies, updatable resource directories) and human capital (e.g., community health navigators, call center operators, social workers). The implementation of these

From technology to fashion to social-issue intervention, nothing stays stagnant. As COVID highlighted, organizations need to be ready to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. How can organizations, especially those in social impact networks, prepare for a changing landscape? One strategy that social impact organizations can use to prepare for change is to enhance their organization’s absorptive capacity. As our previous two blogs have shown, a network’s ability to manage change—both

Networks are similar to suspension bridges. They are held together and supported by the organizations that compose them. Our previous blog covered changes in the whole network, but impactful change can happen among organizational members. Change within a member organization can upset the balance of the network, impacting one or many organizations in the network.  Consider a scenario where a critical participating organization undergoes a management change. A new manager