個案總覽

After the Great Recession, the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, needed to compete even harder for every dollar. Arthur C. Brooks and his colleagues set out to demonstrate its true impact to a generation of data-savvy philanthropists. AEI's output is pretty straightforward: books, research articles, op-eds, media appearances, and so on. Determining its impact meant measuring its competitive standing in the marketplace of ideas. Brooks describes two of the metrics AEI uses: how many op-eds its scholars publish in prominent newspapers and how often those scholars are called by Congress to give testimony. Measured against its four leading competitors, AEI can claim 36% of op-eds over the period 2015-2017 and the most testimonies (by a wide margin) in the years 2009-2017.