With considerable experience in the human services sector, both as front-line human service professionals and as foundation executives, Steve Butz (Founder, Social Solutions) and David Hunter (Hunter Consulting) became increasingly frustrated by the ineffective manner in which funds are allocated to nonprofit organizations. With a shared belief that the most effective organizations are those that actively manage their performance, Steve and David set out to develop a set of performance indicators that could be used to determine the likelihood that an organization would generate social value. They created the Guide to Effective Social Investing.

To gather feedback on the guide and to use their influence to improve the supply of, and demand for, more meaningful information to inform donor decisions, a group of nonprofit leaders were brought together. This group calls themselves the Alliance for Effective Social Investing.