RECAP: Grading My Predictions for Social Entrepreneurship 2009

Ah the end of the year. The time for lists. As I gear up for a set of posts next week about the top trends that will shape social entrepreneurship in 2010, it seemed appropriate to cast an honest eye towards last year's predictions and grade how well I did.

Top Trend 2009 #7: Globally-Engaged Education - GRADE: A-

The trend towards more and more undergrads being involved with more social and entrepreneurial projects definitely continued. Highlights include the collaboration of the Student Consortium for Global Service on globalservice.change.org, the Peery Foundation's work with Brigham Young University, and the launch of the Unreasonable Institute, which while not focused strictly on undergrads is definitely one of the most comprehensive education programs I've seen.

Top Trend 2009 #6: Measuring Social Impact - GRADE: B+

This was a big year for measurement getting both bigger and smarter. I think the most notable event was the recent press release jointly signed by Charity Navigator, Guidestar, GiveWell, Great Nonprofits, and Philanthropedia throwing overhead ratios under the bus as the key measure of social impact quality. The grade is in the B's reflecting the fact that it was the announcement, not the changes (at least to the biggies like Charity Navigator) that came this year.

Top Trend 2009 #5: Mobile Technology - GRADE: B

There was a ton of movement in the mobile social technology space this year, including the launches of FrontlineSMS:Medic and FrontlineSMS:Credit. What's more, both The Extraordinaries and Samasource launched awesome applications for using mobile for good. Still, I think that we'll look back at 2009 as a building year for a more intense unleashing of the power of mobile for good in years to come.

Top Trend 2009 #4: Online Action Platforms - GRADE: B+/A-

This is a tough one. On the one hand, nothing surfaced this year that fundamentally revolutionized the way that online platforms enable action for good. That said, some amazing new donation centered groups like Vittana started to come into their own, exerting collective energy for good - particularly when it came to pressuring companies to shift bad policies - became a major part of spaces like Change.org, and there are a number of new entrants to the market trying to help people shift their own behavior like Moxyvote (easy online shareholder voting and advocacy) and Earthaid (personal energy consumption tracking) that could make a major dent next year. What's more, the conversation about Kiva helped us think more about the whole online action space.

Top Trend 2009 #3: Blended Value Investing - GRADE: B

My grade of B is less a suggestion that blended value investing didn't shape social entrepreneurship this year, and more about the fact that I didn't appreciate to what extent impact investing was going to go through a serious building year. The Global Impact Investing Network and the Village Capital Fund are two of the notable outputs, but I think that 2010 is going to blow 2009 away when it comes to this space.

Top Trend 2009 #2: Green Innovation - GRADE: C

I gave this one the lowest grade so far for two reasons: 1) The conversation about green really is more or less a world unto itself and doesn't necessarily impact the field of social entrepreneurship as much because of that, and 2) while there is constantly innovation, I think the thing that the two things that must shift to make a dent are consumer behavior and government policy. There are some new innovating approaches to consumer behavior that I think will be coming in 2010, but policy is still sorta in the crapper.

Top Trend 2009: #1: A Partner in the White House - GRADE: Incomplete

I probably should have seen this coming, but it's taken the full year more or less just to get the basic infrastructure of the Office of Social Innovation up and running and it's only just in the last week that congress has allocated the full money to the Social Innovation Fund. Where I went to school at Northwestern, an "Incomplete" meant "You can take a little longer than we planned as long as you do good." That's what I'm hoping to see with this prediction.

OVERALL: B

I think that overall, these trends did impact social entrepreneurship, but I underestimated the extent to which the recession influenced 2009 was going to be a building year for a lot of these different spaces.

What do you think? Leave your ideas and thoughts in the comments and watch out next week for my 2010 trend posts.

(Photo: Seanmcgrath)