After becoming increasingly frustrated by the ineffective manner in which funds are allocated to nonprofit organizations Jeff Mason and David Hunter decided to do something to help bring about a change. With a shared belief that the most effective organizations are those that actively manage their performance, David and Jeff created the Alliance for Effective Social Investing. This diverse group of sector thought leaders works collaboratively to drive more funds to high-performing nonprofits. The idea is that if more money goes to high-performers than more will strive to be high-performing. High-performing nonprofits have the following characteristics:
- They have clear and reasonable goals that are in-line with the organization's available resources.
- They have a well conceived strategy for reaching their goals.
- They have identified key milestones/indicators that can be used to measure their progress towards their goals.
- They collect quality data that relates efforts taken to desired outcomes to understand which of their efforts are working to move them closer to their objectives and which are not.
- They use data to make ongoing adjustments to their approach to continuously improve.
- They can provide meaningful reports on the results that they have achieved as well as the mistakes they have made and how they have rectified their mistakes.