The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program: Impact on Stakeholders

In 2018, a new challenge confronted the executive director of the Inside-Out Center in Philadelphia, who was also the founder of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, an international network of educators providing university courses in prisons for both incarcerated individuals and university students. Despite the program’s many success stories, to gain new funders, the founder needed to communicate the program’s impact through measurable effects. Assessing long-term impacts seemed nearly impossible because of difficulties in tracking the participants as they graduated from their university programs or completed their prison sentences and returned to the outside world. The measurement effort was also controversial because although the use of quantitative measures would help to raise funds, it could also challenge the value of the program’s well-established practices and could change the relative roles and influence of various key stakeholders. Whose definitions of “impact” should be prioritized, and how could the program’s impact be measured and communicated?

This case is intended for an impact- or fundraising-measurement class in a course on social entrepreneurship or non-profit management. It would also be suitable for a discussion on stakeholders in a course on business ethics or business and society. In an undergraduate-level course, the focus is identifying stakeholders and applying the logic model of change as a tool for managing and communicating with stakeholders. In a graduate-level course, the focus can be expanded to also include calculating the social return on investment, applying communication and influence strategies, and balancing trade-offs between stakeholders’ interests. Working through the case, students will<ul><li>learn and apply two social impact measurement tools: the logic model of change and (for more advanced students) the social return on investment;</li><li>learn and apply stakeholder mapping and management tools;</li><li>explore the role of impact measurement in identifying and managing, and perhaps exacerbating conflicting stakeholder interests; and</li><li>explore the role of class, race, and economic power differentials in shaping stakeholder perspectives and organizational choices.</li></ul>

• stakeholders
• social Impact
• network organization
• nonprofit
• impact measurement