Blue chips are well known programs like the World Food Program or UNICEF; they are world-famous, stable, and have a good reputation. A program that seeks to scale, to enter other territories within or outside the country is the equivalent of high-growing stock in the financial market.
Undervalued stock is a program that is in transition and needs help to get through and adapt to change. Long-term bonds are the equivalent of operating support for a program without specifying what specific project the program will implement.
This exercise helps social investors understand that they value different financial instruments differently. They look at different types of stocks, investment funds or bonds using different criteria, and we also evaluate different programs using different criteria depending on the nature of the program and the nature of the investment. Using the logic of evaluating financial instruments helps them understand the logic of evaluating programs.
The theory of transformation, trying to change systems, must consist of many different theories of change. The Blue Marble evaluation is related to the theory of transformation: once we start dealing with large systems, we are dealing with global impacts.
Investors in social projects also have internal networks and have developed a number of methodological approaches. For example, they are very fond of the social return on investment (SROI) method. Sometimes it is even taken as the only possible, no-alternative method for evaluating the results of any project. This seems to go at odds with the evaluation specialists’ views – again, based on the utilization-focused evaluation concept.
The social effectiveness of investments still needs to be interpreted and adapted, depending on whether we are talking about long-term or short-term social effectiveness of investments, about innovative high-risk programs, high-risk programs with high performance potential, or low-risk, low-return programs. When I talk about parallels between different kinds of financial instruments and different kinds of programs, I’m talking about how much risk social project investors are willing to take, how innovative they want to be, what the time span is for investment and return, whether they are looking for several different indicators or just one measure of success.