Social Impact

Social
Impact

Cicero® Social Impact collaborates with mission-driven leaders and organizations to maximize their impact in society.

EXPERTISE

CLIENTS

We are privileged to serve a wide variety of organizations across the social sector, across the U.S. and around the world. From former Presidents of the United States to a local homeless shelter to NGOs fighting poverty in Nicaragua, all of our clients strive to solve some of society’s most complex challenges. Our depth and history allow us to combine the best practices from a range of experiences with a commitment to tailoring our services to each client’s needs. All in an effort to help our clients do even better what they already do so well—make the world a better place.

SOLUTIONS

Measurable, lasting impact requires much more than a compelling plan, a rigorous evaluation, or effective project management. At Cicero, we bring world-class expertise, research, analysis, and experience to every client we serve. As we do, our end-to-end approach means we’re not just experts in each of our solution areas. Our strategies are designed to ensure good implementation; our M&E works hand-in-glove with (and often clarifies) each client’s strategy.

But we’re more than just consultants. In addition to our skillsets, we always commit our passion, partnership, and compassion to everyone we work with—both our clients’ teams and the people they serve. We ensure that our solutions build on and reflect their values, paradigms, strengths, and aspirations.

PEOPLE

Our Social Impact team comes from a wide variety of backgrounds throughout the social sector. In addition, we collaborate closely with other Cicero experts in K-12 Education, Higher Education, Impact Investing, Strategy & Transformation, and Insights and Analytics.

INSIGHTS

This is our center for sharing knowledge, research, and thought leadership. Cicero Social Impact publishes data-driven insights to help drive success and improve efficiency in a fast-paced and challenging environment.

Recent Publications

Excellence in Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL)

Interview with Jacob Allen: Solving the ESG puzzle

The path to business impact: why and how of doing good

Solutions

Unfortunately, good intentions and passionate effort are not enough to make a difference in an increasingly complex world. Clarity and specificity about the intended impact an organization desires to achieve and how it intends to accomplish that impact is essential. To do this, we combine values, data, and differentiation to not just create a plan, but to ensure it will be understood, lived, and refined by the entire organization.

Sample Services:

  • Long-term organizational planning
  • Scaling and growth strategies
  • Transformation and change management strategies
  • Donor and beneficiary research and segmentation
  • Prioritizing target populations, issue areas, or locations
  • Partner, grantee, or investee due diligence
  • Philanthropic or impact investment portfolio design

Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) is crucial to both proving and improving impact. But getting M&E right is hard. We balance strategy, rigor, and efficiency to ensure clients’ have the data they need to exceed stakeholders’ expectations and to drive constant learning and improvement.

Sample Services:

  • Outcome and metric frameworks
  • Assessment and learning strategies
  • Evaluation and methodology design
  • Long-term and/or rigorous impact evaluations
  • Ongoing performance monitoring
  • Data collection, analysis, and reporting

Solving complex societal problems requires more than just developing a plan; doing the work to create change is often the hardest part. No matter the challenge, our team helps our clients—and their partners—change the world by applying the best of implementation science, effective management, and a collaborative, nimble approach to the work.

Sample Services:

  • Initiative launch, management, and scaling
  • Partner and grantee management
  • Ongoing performance monitoring and evaluation
  • Transformation and change management
  • Family or corporate philanthropy (e.g. grant-making, reporting, operations, etc.)

Like many others, our hope is for homelessness to be rare, brief, and non-recurring.

Unlike many others, we approach this objective strategically, clearly delineating what success looks like in order to reach our goals efficiently and instill long-lasting solutions.

We believe it starts with a re-framing of the issue. Rather than labeling ‘lack of housing’ as the problem, we recognize that there are deeper underlying issues perpetuating one’s homelessness – substance abuse, mental illness, domestic abuse and more. Accurately identifying, assessing, and targeting these issues on a case-by-case basis initiates an all-encompassing recovery process directed towards long-term stability. Our aim is to provide a cure – not a “band aid” solution.

The Cicero Approach to Alleviating Homelessness

Clients

CICERO® GROUP

Cicero Group is a premier management consulting firm focused on implementing data-driven strategies for a broad mix of private, public, and social sector organizations across the globe. We work with top management to assess needs and provide data-driven decision support to capture and build value in a variety of industries and across a full range of organization structures.

We bring deep functional expertise in advanced research and analytics, strategy, operational excellence and trajectory transformation to identify and capture value for our clients. These are the pillars of Cicero Group’s overarching purpose: Help clients create and continuously deliver extraordinary results.

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