Mari Kuraishi

Co-Founder + President, GlobalGiving

Who She Is:

Mari co-founded GlobalGiving with Dennis Whittle in 2002 and currently leads the organization. In 2011, she was named one of Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers. Before GlobalGiving, Mari worked at the World Bank where she managed and created some of the Bank's most innovative projects, including the first ever Innovation and Development Marketplaces.

Q: Social impact is a term that is commonly used in the nonprofit sector, but difficult to define. What does it mean to you?

 
A: In my mind, there is a hierarchy with outputs, outcomes, and impact. Let’s say we are in maternal health. Outputs might be the number of patients seen in a clinic. Outcomes are things like percentage of healthy births, infant weight at birth, or reduced maternal mortality. Outputs are easily measured, sometimes day to day, and outcomes are measured over a longer term. Impact requires us to take yet a longer view. Increased maternal health is clearly an outcome, but it might be measured ultimately by measures like increased longevity, greater maternal engagement in the labor force (leading to higher income for the household), or greater maternal investment in children’s education or health. That in turn translates to better outcomes for the communities where the mothers live.

Q: Measuring social impact can be complex and costly for nonprofits, yet funding often hinges on a nonprofit’s ability to prove impact. What advice do you have for nonprofits trying to balance these demands?

 
A: One thing you must do is create social impact measurements that work for you and not just your funders. If the metrics that you are using aren’t useful to you and your own programs, they are not helpful. One of the examples I can give from my own experience is that one of our funders said to GlobalGiving, ‘You must have a retention rate of 50% of donors,’ which seemed to make sense. In reality, it was targeting a single, albeit important metric out of many other metrics that contributed to our overall viability. It would have been better for me to push back on that and say, ‘Let’s focus on our ability to put together a sustainable business model.’ Because we believe that our own ability to deliver impact is via the thousands of nonprofit partners we work with around the world, it was critical that we have the staying power to be their long-term partner. And a sustainable business model, not the specific retention rate around donors, was more appropriate. Always acknowledge that social impact is important to both you and the funder, and focus on metrics that point to impact.

Q: How does GlobalGiving measure its social impact?

 
A: What impact means for us is not just working better as an organization so that we intermediate financial transactions more efficiently or that we sign up more organizations to GlobalGiving more quickly and more accurately. That’s all great and that speaks to our efficiency, but it doesn’t translate to impact. Impact means that we support our nonprofit partners to do more with the financial resources and the information and the ideas that they get through us. We succeed when they succeed. When we have a measurable goal, expanding impact on our partners, and meet that goal, we count that as our impact.

Q: How do you approach social impact measurement as a leader in your organization?

 
A: Some of the stuff that we’re trying to solve is not just complicated, but seemingly utopian. It’s not always clear how you can achieve it, let alone measure it. Most of us as nonprofits are trying to achieve our goals either through influence, or in concert with other people, institutions, and governments. That makes it hard to pin down whether you either achieved the outcome you sought, or to isolate your particular role in it. It’s definitely an iterative process.

The best thing is to set out a hypothesis about how the change that you want to see in the world happens as a result of your activity. It’s a Theory of Change based on a certain understanding of how the world works. That understanding in turn is based on certain assumptions about how others in our ecosystem operate. By laying that all out—from the causal links to the outcomes and impact we seek, to the particular ways in which other people or institutions operate—we can constantly be checking whether they are being borne out. When you discover a break in the causal link, or a faulty assumption, you’ll be able to isolate it, and iterate to a better Theory of Change.

I’m not a huge risk taker. I don’t like to go bungee jumping. I think mountain biking is kind of crazy. I don’t think of myself as someone who thrives on risk. But I do think, at the end of the day, if you’re not willing to measure yourself against things that you don’t know if you will succeed, then you are not really putting yourself out there. If your goals are not that ambitious, at the end of the day, you might find yourself saying ‘Is that all I could have done?’