I was recently invited to speak at this year’s Global Social Benefit Incubator at Santa Clara University on the topic of “Leadership for Growth.” I am a graduate of the 2006 class of the GSBI, which can pretty much be summed up as a two-week, 12-hour-a-day boot camp for social entrepreneurs. The GSBI’s location plays an essential role. I think there is an affinity between social entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley — there is common understanding about entrepreneurialism and its successes and struggles. Also, venture capital’s approach to investment can help teach social entrepreneurs a lot about how to refine their value proposition, perfect their pitch, and get their financial models right. I really valued the GSBI because it provided a pause for reflection. Very rarely do we get the chance to step back and think strategically and be reflective.

When I attended the program, I had the opportunity to work with some incredible people and organizations, including Matt Flannery (Kiva.org), Satyan Mishra (Drishtee), Suresh Subramanian (IDE India), and Bal Joshi (Thamel International), among others. These classmates and their experiences motivated me tremendously then, and still do so today. More than anything, the GSBI helped me to recognize that there are so many smart and talented people out there tackling these enormous challenges, and that with a little coordination, some skills development, and a supportive environment, we can accomplish great things.

I am amazed by some of the achievements of my classmates from 2006. I recently learned that Bal now has more than $100 million in annual transactions running through his company, Thamel.com, which back then was just getting off the ground. Certainly Matt and Kiva.org’s story is well-documented, but I remember when Matt was sitting in class programming the website and trying to drive enough deal-flow to meet the lenders’ demand.

Looking at the Class of 2008, I saw another “us” – another “generation” of motivated people trying to tackle large challenges and doing it differently. It was exciting and inspiring. I wish them the best.

The following is a post from Tim Johnson-Aramaki, a student at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, who spent the summer with VisionSpring India working on a data-collection methodology to measure the long-term impact of VisionSpring’s work on the lives of Vision Entrepreneurs and customers. His project is part of a multi-year impact study conducted by Professor Ted London at Michigan’s William Davidson Institute.

“Over the last few months, I’ve been working to develop a survey instrument with the VisionSpring team here in Hyderabad and the William Davidson Institute team in Ann Arbor. The first step was survey pre-testing, which involved conducting countless interviews in rural village throughout the state of Andhra Pradesh. These interviews are meant to help us discover whether the questions we’ve come up with are understood by respondents with varying semantic and cultural backgrounds, and if they prompt valid and appropriate responses. Some of the results we’ve gathered have been really interesting.

For example, one of the most critical pieces of data in measuring VisionSpring’s impact is the income of its Vision Entrepreneurs and customers. It also happens to be one of the most difficult things to measure as there are challenges when it comes to discussing money. Through our interviews, we’ve found that while people are relatively open in assigning a number to their income, that number may not be accurate. There are a variety of reasons for this, but one is that they fear the income figures may be passed on to state or national agencies, potentially jeopardizing the public assistance they receive. To avoid this, they often provide income figures lower than that which they actually earn.

Responses can also be skewed because interviewees seem to identify the interviewer as higher up on the social ladder. With that in mind, the interviewees often attempt to please the interviewer with superlatively positive answers about product or service quality and refuse to make any constructive criticism. Moreover, in areas of the survey that allow for subjective self-measurement, many interviewees have attempted to “impress” the interviewer with potentially inflated responses. For example, we had to alter an entire section that measured an individual’s self-assessed capacity in tasks such as interpersonal communication because nearly all the responses to these questions were either a four (“agree”) or five (“strongly agree”). There would have been no improvement to measure!

Working through these issues to get an effective impact-assessment tool for the base of the pyramid has been challenging but rewarding. What’s so great about this project is that while it’s being made for and by VisionSpring, ultimately the survey and survey-development practices developed here in Hyderabad could really benefit other organizations working at the base of the pyramid in helping them measure the success of their work.”