Social Impact Investing

income must file a Form 990. The form provides information on the organization's
mission, programs and finances. The public is guaranteed access to this information,
but the IRS has not published this information in a manner consistent with trends in
open data: it not very accessible nor available in a machine-readable format.
President Obama has proposed to phase in a requirement that all nonprofit
organizations file their annual tax returns electronically in order to facilitate improved
access to this information in a manner consistent with the Open Government Initiative.
In November 2013, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus released a tax
reform discussion draft with a proposal to mandate all tax-exempt organizations
required to file a Form 990 electronically and requiring the IRS to make the information
on the forms available to the public in a machine readable format as soon as
practicable.
Evidence-Based Policy
As part of President Obama's management agenda, the Office of Social Innovation has
helped to lead federal agencies to increasingly focus on the use of data and modeling to
inform and improve what is called evidence-based policy.
Evidence Based Policy is not new, but it is an important priority of the Administration, as
outlined explicitly in a Memorandum M-13-17 issued in July 2013 by the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB), and signed by directors of the White House OMB,
Domestic Policy Council (DPC), Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and
Council of Economic Advisors (CEA). The memorandum provides guidance for fiscal
year 2015 agency budget submissions, and describes plans to prioritize budget
requests that strengthen the use of evidence and innovation to inform and improve
decision-making.
The memorandum gave explicit guidance in a number of key issues, such as:
1. Harnessing data to improve agency results
2. High-quality, low-cost evaluations for rapid, iterative experimentation
3. Using innovative outcome-focused grant designs
4. Strengthening agency capacity to use evidence
And OMB, in partnership with DPC, CEA, and OSTP orchestrated workshops designed
to help federal agencies interpret and apply the budget guidance, taking into account
how to focus evaluation resources on the most important policy questions, how to use
"administrative data sets" from multiple programs and agencies, how to conduct
rigorous program evaluations and data analytics on a tight budget, how to use existing
budgetary authority to turn traditional competitive grant programs into innovative,
evidence-based programs, and how agencies could harness research findings from
behavioral science to implement low-cost approaches to improving program efficacy.
Page 102 of 140