Impact Moment: Procter & Gamble’s Customized Data Collection Solution
By Cori Cunningham, Program Director, The Conference Board
Data has been discussed at length recently through various Giving Thoughts blogs and articles, including in the recent series publication by Daniel Shapiro and Scott Cody of Mathematica Policy Research entitled “Data Quality to Further Philanthropy’s Mission.” It’s always interesting to hear from companies about how they’re putting the theory into action, and we had the advantage of doing that during last year’s research working group on “Measuring the Impact of Corporate Social Investments.” Here, I present a case study from member group Procter & Gamble (P&G).
P&G created a custom tool to measure its corporate social investments after it assessed various existing measurement companies and methods and determined that they captured too much or too little data to generate the specific social and business metrics P&G targeted.
Customized data collection solution
To create this custom tool, P&G aligned its criteria for funding grants across the foundation and business budgets and reconfigured those criteria into reporting metrics. As part of its application process, returning nonprofit partners are required to complete a report from the previous grant received in order to be considered for future funding. With this methodology, P&G is able to collect data from nearly 100 percent of applicants receiving initial funding.
Results
P&G’s custom tool creates a more efficient and reliable means of collecting only the targeted data that are relevant to P&G’s giving program and strategic direction—making it easier to track progress against its business and social objectives. A remaining challenge, however, is that P&G’s custom metrics do not lend themselves well to benchmarking results with other companies.
About The Conference Board’s Social Impact Measurement Portfolio
This case study is taken from Measuring the Impact of Corporate Social Investments, the report of a 14-company research working group that examined challenges related to impact measurement. It is one of a range of publications on the topic that The Conference Board has published in the past 12 months. The other publications, including Framing Social Impact Measurement, are available here.
About the author:
Cori Cunningham
Program Director
The Conference Board
Cori Cunningham is the founder of C. Cunningham Advising and an accomplished consultant and solutions-oriented leader with more than a decade of experience advising corporations and social sector organizations on strategies designed to drive positive change. She specializes in uniting teams and stakeholders around common missions, and is a highly skilled strategic planner, analyst and facilitator. Cori works with clients to align community engagement strategies with business goals in the corporate sector, and create thorough and thoughtful plans for identifying and securing corporate relationships in the social sector.
