Managing Social Performance: A Case of Microfinance

Global financial crises might and should be recognized as a potential chance to introduce changes in managing our business, both in financial and other important private and/or public sectors. The prevailing opinion is that a lack of corporative social responsibility is one of the major reasons that lead to global crises occurrence. Nowadays, it is crucial to use the experiences of other industries and sectors which from their very beginning managed to balance finance and social goals at the same time. Microfinance sector is exactly one such sector. This paper is organized as follows: First, we give some overview of different approaches to measuring social performance of microfinance institutions. In this part of the paper we also accent the specifics of microfinance institutions-management within the context of double bottom line. In the second part we focus our analysis on practical implementation of “double bottom line management” in Prizma MCO, one of the world pioneers in social performance management, by using their revolutionary poverty scorecard system. Then, we analyze how these social performance data are used in decision-making and how it affects overall performance of the organization. The paper is finished with some conclusions and lessons learned.