Fast Company Case

The Fast Company / Monitor Group Social Capitalist Awards were created both to specifically assess and recognize the leading social entrepreneurial organizations that participate in the project and, more broadly, to further performance measurement and accountability in the social sector with a highly rigorous, data driven, comparative approach. With each passing year they have enhanced their understanding of the challenges of measuring social impact and organizational performance. They continue to refine their methodology and assessment criteria as a result. Fast Company hopes that, by sharing the essentials of methodology, they can encourage non-profit organizations and their funders to measure, report, and, ultimately, maximize the social impact created with the resources they command.

The Social Capitalist Awards defines strong performance as a combination of both social impact and organizational effectiveness. This performance is represented by five critical components: Social Impact, Aspiration & Growth, Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Sustainability. The underlying theme through all of our components is the organization's ability to analyze tough social and organizational challenges and to craft solutions that create significant improvements over the status quo. Social Impact examines the rigor and sophistication of the organization's approach to social change: the organization's understanding of the problem it is trying to address and the solution it is providing, and whether the organization's performance metrics are tightly aligned with the problem it is addressing.

The next criterion for The Social Capitalist Award is Aspiration and Growth. In addition to proving that an organization is having significant impact today, they also look for organizations that dream big, aiming to push their direct and systemic impact out into the world as far and as fast as they can. Fast Company then judge whether those high aspirations are backed by a logical, achievable growth plan that recognizes relevant organizational challenges and milestones. Entrepreneurship is defined as "the ability to do a lot with a little." Fast Company looks for specific evidence that the organization is able to gather and command disproportionately large resources, and thinks strategically about which resources it deploys in solving its social problem. Innovation is defined as the organization's ability to generate a game-changing or pattern breaking idea. They look for a new solution to an existing social problem or a new business or operational model an evidence that a culture of innovation exists within the organization--that there are processes for continuously developing significant new ideas, evaluating whether or not the organization should invest in a new idea, and plans in place to carry them out. The final area is Sustainability which has two primary dimensions in our assessment. The first