How Predictive Models Can Help Social Impact Organizations
From preventing homelessness to identifying at-risk students, predictive analytics is transforming how social impact organizations anticipate needs and allocate resources. But knowing when—and when not—to use these tools is just as important as understanding how they work. In this guide, we break down the difference between prediction, description, and causation, share real-world examples from crime prevention to food bank logistics, and give you a practical framework for deciding if predictive modeling is right for your mission. As is true with all statistical tools, thoughtful use, rigorous testing, and careful interpretation can be more important than the technologies you use to complete the task.
Spurious Correlation and Data that Lies
Numbers might not lie—but they definitely mislead. In our data-obsessed age, we love to uncover patterns that seem to explain everything, from the stock market to human happiness. But without context or critical thinking, even the cleanest datasets can tell absurd (and dangerous) stories. This post dives into the world of spurious correlations—where margarine predicts divorce, cheese dictates stock prices, and journalists mistake coincidence for causation. Through humor and hard truths, it explores how data can both amuse and misinform—and why every correlation needs a thoughtful human interpreter.
Housing First and the Economics of Stability: Lessons from New Path
Homelessness represents a complex social problem that reflects broader structural inequalities in housing markets, healthcare access, and economic opportunity. From a sociological perspective, chronic homelessness cannot be understood simply as an individual failure, but rather as the outcome of systemic barriers that prevent vulnerable populations from accessing stable housing and supportive services. Guest author, Mcallister Hall, from the Idaho Policy Institute, presents one policy approach that has proven effective in addressing these social challenges.
The Professional Context Crisis
We encounter people every day whose behavior is confusing, frustrating, annoying, or just "bad.” It is easy to label behaviors and make judgments about a person's motivations and intentions. But what if we could step back for a moment and, before moving into judgment, get curious? To wonder what might be going on? To do that, we have to understand more about the links between stressful life experiences (both past and present) and behaviors we see in the classroom, workplace, and even in ourselves. But how do we “get curious” when we see a behavior or reaction that feels way out of proportion or just out of line?
The truth is, there are really simple ways we can acknowledge and address individual adversity and how it shows up at work, but we have to be intentional about the design and the follow-through.
The Research Advantage: Why Context Is Everything in Philanthropy
With $592.50 billion in charitable giving in 2024, foundations possess unprecedented resources to create transformative social change. Yet most philanthropic organizations are making a critical error that undermines their impact: they fund programs in isolation, often ignoring the broader social and economic context that determines whether interventions actually work.
Breaking the Cycle: How Feedback Loops Shape Humanitarian Work
In 1970, MIT professor Jay Forrester made a startling observation about urban poverty programs: many well-intentioned interventions were actually making the problems they sought to solve worse. Housing programs designed to help the poor were concentrating poverty and creating urban decay. Job training programs were pulling the most capable people out of struggling communities, weakening them further. Good intentions weren't enough—the systems themselves were creating cycles that perpetuated the very problems they aimed to fix.
Going Nowhere, Fast: Why Objectivity and Efficiency are Not Enough
For our clients and partners in the social sector, the tension between objective efficiency and subjective social good is felt every time they’re asked to calculate the ROI of a person no longer sleeping in the cold or the economic impact of community solidarity. It’s not that such returns don’t exist, it’s that they fail to capture virtually any of what actually makes such work important.
“Just Trust Us”: 4 Reasons Nonprofits Must Embrace Data-Driven Impact
Nonprofits need to focus on why they do their work. This is impact, and this is where movement and inspiration exist. The "why" is created when nonprofits are able to share stories informed by the narratives their beneficiaries tell and the data found in the services they provide.
Making “Theory of Change” Matter
A theory of change, when done well, is more than a schematic. It’s a window into the strategic thinking of an organization—how it understands the problem it's trying to solve, the levers it believes can move that problem, and the assumptions that undergird every action it takes. For funders, engaging seriously with a grantee’s theory of change isn’t just due diligence, it’s a way to deepen partnership, surface learning opportunities, and sharpen impact.
The Matthew Effect in Public Education
Success breeds success, and disadvantage compounds over time—but what if this isn’t just true for students, but for entire schools? In this blog post, Robert Meldau explores how the Matthew Effect shapes public education, making it easier for well-resourced schools to succeed while leaving disadvantaged schools trapped in cycles of instability.
Drawing from his experience as a principal at a low-income elementary school, he unpacks the hidden forces—like residential mobility and leadership turnover—that quietly determine a school’s fate. More importantly, he asks: Are we measuring school quality in a way that actually reflects the work being done? And if not, how can we do better?
Behind the Buy
The tension between counterfeit and genuine communities is clear: the former offers convenience without reciprocity, while the latter thrives on complexity, mutual care, and shared investment. Real communities aren’t just neat consumer experiences—they’re messy, meaningful, and built on connections.
Taylor Swift concerts exemplify this: more than music, they foster shared cultural bonds. Similarly, brands like Barnes & Noble thrive by shifting from corporate individualism to nurturing in-person connections. Successful brands don’t create communities; they support and amplify existing ones, turning shared values into enduring relationships.
Hotdogs Are Not Sandwiches: A Ridiculous, Relatable, Somewhat Serious Case for Context
If you understand context, you realize that a hotdog is not a sandwich in any useful sense. Obviously there are much more important questions, and they are often no less convoluted. How critical is it, then, that we understand the context in which we deploy social impact programs? How can we enact education interventions without understanding the classroom, teachers, students, and their home lives? How can we create and deliver products/solutions that make a difference if we don’t understand the context in which they will be used?
7 Reasons Why Social Impact Measurement Matters
Social impact measurement can (and should) be more than a box you check. It can help you maximize the good, avoid the bad, and get buy-in so you can do even more.
The Heart and Soul of Social Good—Part 3: The Science and Art of Social Impact
To have impact at scale, you must understand people at scale. Sociologists can, of course, help measure outcomes and can draw on past research to consult from outside. But where we do our best work is from the inside, as part of the design team, where we can help you make sure that all relevant voices are heard and that all relevant markers are being factored into your definition of success.
The Heart and Soul of Social Good—Part 2: A (Socio)logical Perspective
Sociology is about studying and understanding social influence. Often, the work of sociologists can make visible invisible social influences, and can help understand irrational behavior as rational.
The Heart and Soul of Social Good—Part 1: Understanding the Field
It may go without saying that “social good” is the goal of most nonprofit organizations, philanthropies, community organizations and is an integral part of what local, state, and federal governments intend to do—benefit society. So, if social good is an innately human experience and the idea itself is not new, what is?
Pre-thinking Data
There’s so much data available to today’s organizations. Sometimes the data are easy to collect because they come from web-based platforms. However, regardless of the effort it takes to get it, data too often don’t fulfill their promise.
Tectonic Plates of the Social World
We can use a variety of unique frameworks or lenses when we look at an organization, and each will reveal new constraints and motivations.