Furthermore, they’d be of great value to institutional funders, who could begin rewarding non-profits that are producing more impact per dollar with more dollars. Perhaps even one or two ambitious institutional funders offer to pay groups purely based on performance (setting a “market price” for impacts). Perhaps that institutional funder is ambitious and uses the internet and new media to allow private givers to make “guaranteed impact” donations — gifts that are only released to a non-profit after that group has achieved a certain impact.

Obviously, clearinghouses like these would have to be industry (and to some extent locationaly) specific. And they wouldn’t solve all of the problems (after all, some services are not profitable and don’t have impact measurements but are invaluable)… but they’d be a great start (and if you know of anything like this, please let me know, I’d like to study them).

From my understanding, PAL and IPA are more like think tanks than anything else (but still awesome… my day job non-profit co-hosted a Poverty Action Conference designed to expose college students to impact first principles).

I love where this is going, thank you (and the others) for your leadership on this. Everything should be under impact and providing impact at a value.

Something else I think is necessary: “industry” based groups that help us to compare impact across non-profits (and also may help us deliver it at value).

Rather than asking each non-profit to do their own impact analysis, for established industries (like say closing the achievement gap in children ages 6-9 [I'm not an education guru, so that might not make sense, but you get my point]) could be especially useful for foundations and major donors to see real ways that they can get more impact for their money.