Better Reporting Essential to Social Capital Marketplace

Rowena Young, Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford's Business School has a terrific new blog posting in which she, "takes forward the debates from the 2006 Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship"to scope out the ways we can most constructively think about capital markets for social ventures, and to describe some of the most promising approaches that already show what can be done."

After having just completed our own review of the literature, we were struck by the comprehensiveness of her analysis and findings.  The one additional point to add on the "supply side" forces that might drive a social capital marketplace (donors) is that, since the psychic reward for giving is "already priced into the market" of philanthropy, there is reason to believe that it will take much better reporting of social returns from the "demand side" (nonprofits) to move donors to engage more in social investment. Better accountability, then, is a prerequisite of the future social capital marketplace, not a nice-to-have result or by-product. Nobody can predict the power of this kind of reporting, or the trust that will start to build, but we know it is an essential foundation for the social capital marketplaces of the future.

Carla E. Dearing