SmartyGrants showing the way for social impact students

The SmartyGrants team has provided access to its grants management software to students to help them to create realistic funding programs, and has also made its staff available to deliver guest lectures in the developing field of outcomes measurement.

The work with Centre for Social Impact graduate students is part of SmartyGrants’ larger commitment to boosting recognition and training for grantmakers.

The Centre for Social Impact (CSI) is a collaboration between four Australian universities focused on education and research in social change, including Swinburne University in Melbourne.

Melbourne’s CSI operates from Swinburne University’s business, law and entrepreneurship school, and since 2014 has been pulling together the threads of social enterprise, tech, research and education.

SmartyGrants began offering students access to its system soon after the school was established, and has offered expert lectures to students since then.

The Swinburne school teaches graduate certificate and PhD students about social impact, with courses designed to appeal to professionals looking to advance in the areas of philanthropy, the not-for-profit sector, social enterprise, social innovation and entrepreneurship.

Fiona Waugh from the SmartyGrants managed services team, who helps grantmakers to develop better funding programs, recently delivered a lecture to CSI strategic philanthropy students about impact measurement and evaluation in grantmaking. Other SmartyGrants staff have taught students how to make the most of the SmartyGrants platform. Waugh said the presentation “was a chance to get them thinking about our approach”, and she used her talk to reveal the internal workings of SmartyGrants, its “Outcomes Engine” and the SmartyGrants Grantmaking Toolkit’s nine-stage grantmaking lifecycle.

Course director Susan Pizzati, principal industry fellow at Swinburne’s CSI, said the SmartyGrants relationship was a “fantastic example of how practical and industry-engaged all of our courses and units are”.

“We go to great pains to ensure that the work that we're doing with our students is really merging those aspects of academic research and practical real-world experience.”

Pizzatti said students came from not-for-profits, philanthropy, social enterprise and government at all levels, and that measurement was essential in social impact work, withinterest in the area “increasing exponential across many sectors”.

Swinburne CSI is currently offering several $5,000 part-scholarships to students wishing to undertake graduate training in social impact.