On August 18, 2015 Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN) and the Center for Social Sector Leadership at the University of California (UC), Berkeley’s Haas School of Business reported a multi-year partnership to offer a graduate-level course on measuring outcomes of cancer patient advocacy education and support programs (Press release, Amgen, AUG 18, 2015, View Source;p=RssLanding&cat=news&id=2080267 [SID:1234507289]). The MBA course, Social Impact Metrics, is designed to advance the ability of nonprofit organizations to measure the effectiveness of their programs, which is critical in an increasingly challenging donor environment. The overall goal of the initiative is to create a set of measurement best practices that can be adopted across the cancer nonprofit community and beyond.

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Amgen has awarded four cancer patient advocacy groups – Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network, Cancer Support Community, Chris4Life Colon Cancer Foundation and Critical Mass – with $35,000 sponsorships to measure the impact of an educational or support initiative. The Berkeley MBA students and faculty will work with the winners to evaluate a specific metrics challenge, recommend a solution, and provide an implementation plan during the semester-long course from August to December 2015.

"Establishing meaningful metrics is critical for nonprofits to improve their impact on the lives of those they serve and demonstrate results to funders," said Colin Boyle, deputy director of University of California, San Francisco Global Health Services and the Haas faculty member who will be teaching this course.

The partnership was formed based on the results of a survey of cancer nonprofit organizations conducted by Amgen in 2013. The study found that creating robust metrics can be a challenge in the social impact field, even as foundations, nonprofits, social enterprises and corporations seek to develop stronger and more significant measures of effectiveness.

"This partnership, like other experiential learning opportunities at UC Berkeley, gives our students a chance to develop and implement solutions in the real world," said Nora Silver, faculty director for the Center for Social Sector Leadership (formerly known as the Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership). "These types of experiences will prove invaluable to our students as they learn how to forge evidence-based solutions that address current challenges for nonprofits."

"Amgen and other healthcare companies provide substantial support to patient advocacy organizations with the hope that, together, we are making a difference in meeting the needs of patients and families," said Raymond C. Jordan, senior vice president of Corporate Affairs at Amgen. "By measuring the impact of these programs, we can learn how to be more effective in achieving our shared goal of improving the lives of people with cancer. Amgen is excited to support this unique initiative that establishes multi-disciplinary collaboration between the pharmaceutical, academic and patient advocacy communities."

About the Winning Patient Advocacy Projects

Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network’s (BCAN) Patient Webinar Series launched in 2012, to address a variety of education topics and features bladder cancer experts from highly-regarded medical institutions. BCAN is looking to measure the impact this series has on patients, caregivers and family members.

Cancer Support Community (CSC) seeks to better measure the impact of the CSC Cancer Support Helpline, which reaches thousands of patients, family members and health care professionals each year. Launched in April of 2012, licensed mental health professionals provide telephone support interventions that help patients and caregivers identify and address needs and link them to vital information and community resources in order to help them to live better lives, reduce distress and better engage with their health care team.

Chris4Life Colon Cancer Foundation’s clinical trial database, Blue Data, is designed to provide a simple and user-friendly interface that allows patients to accelerate the process of identifying appropriate clinical trials for participation and simplifying the screening process. Chris4Life seeks to measure how patients are engaging with the database in order to improve upon its function and use in order to increase the number of patients who participate in clinical trials.

Critical Mass is looking to measure the impact of its "Mission Control" localized search engine of programs and services specifically curated for adolescents and young adults with cancer. By analyzing the data captured from its current users, Critical Mass seeks to improve the efficient identification of relevant resources to ensure that every adolescent and young adult diagnosed with cancer finds the resources they need, when they need them.

About the Course and Award Criteria

The course will consist of a research project conducted by Berkeley MBA students to assess best practices in nonprofit programming and metrics. The research project is expected to be submitted for publication to a social impact journal. The students’ efforts will not only benefit the sponsorship awardees, but also the patient advocacy community at large that can adopt and learn from the case study solutions upon publication.

The call-for-sponsorships was announced in March 2015, and applications were due by May 29, 2015. To qualify for the award, the nonprofits must have demonstrated a commitment to measuring the impact of their educational or patient support initiatives and have had a specific program or initiative they wished to measure more effectively, along with meeting other criteria for consideration. The selection committee considered a range of criteria, including the variety and mix of programs, relevance to the broader cancer and nonprofit communities and feasibility of executing the metrics solution within the allotted timeframe.