Every year, the Skoll Foundation has the privilege of managing the sourcing and selection of the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship. The Skoll Award is an investment of $1.5 million in four-to-six organizations that have shown ability to drive large-scale, sustained change on one of the world’s most pressing problems and are poised to scale that impact. With 111 Skoll Awards over the last 15 years, this community is a testament to the impact that social entrepreneurs can drive through partnership, unwavering focus on wicked problems, and visionary leadership.
We constantly try to improve our process and the impact our awards can have on the social entrepreneurs and their organizations, their communities, and the systems they hope to change. We also acknowledge the opportunity cost of candidates spending their valuable time in our process.
In the early years, the Foundation had an open application process for the award. When that open application pool grew too large for the four-to-six awards we give each year, we shifted to a referral-based process. That approach has tradeoffs for equity and access, no matter how much we invest in expanding our referral network in underrepresented spaces and places. A referral-based approach also obscures our process and who we are considering year over year.
To correct that, we want to both provide additional insight into our process and a view into part of our pipeline from this past year. The 79 organizations below caught our attention for the 2020 Skoll Award, and we will announce the 2020 Skoll Award cohort in late March.
For the 2020 Skoll Awards, we received over 700 referrals. We employ a multi-year pipeline process, so we’ve considered many of these 700 before and may again in the future. We first conducted a rapid screening of those organizations based on available information online or shared by a partner or the organization itself. That process narrowed our pool to about 150 organizations. From there we review each in more depth, prioritizing, and building a representative pool (by issue area, demographics, model, etc.) of around 70-80 organizations that we have capacity to review in our formal selection process.
This past year, 79 organizations received a short Request for Information (RFI), which informs our intelligence in consideration for the 2020 Skoll Award and participation in our other initiatives, such as the Skoll World Forum. We then select less than 20 to submit a much more extensive application and reference list. We then conduct in-the-field due diligence on ten organizations, and our Board makes the final decision on our annual 4-6 Skoll Awardees.
There are a multitude of outstanding social entrepreneurs doing significant work in the world, but we only have the capacity to give 4-6 Skoll Awards per year. With the privilege of getting to know so many leaders—many of whom we cannot fund directly—comes the responsibility to share with others who may be able to partner with them on their journey. We invest a lot of time in sharing specific leads and diligence findings with other funders and strategic partners. Please reach out if this would be helpful to your organization.
However, we have never made our pipeline public. The list below are the 79 organizations we invited to submit an RFI for the 2020 Skoll Award. It is not exhaustive, and there are many more outstanding social entrepreneurs that we have engaged in our process in past years or plan to in the future. There are many reasons why an organization on this list would not move forward for the Skoll Award this year: an active choice by the organization to focus on other priorities, a mismatch with one of our criteria or our specific definition of social entrepreneurship, or a determination that aligned organizations would be better suited for the Skoll Award in a future year. These 79 passed our initial screening stage and prompted us to learn more from each organization directly. We hope that others can benefit from these insights into our process and this resulting list.
Please click here to see the list of organizations.
We continue to explore ways to make our pipeline and process more transparent while respecting social entrepreneurs and their organizations’ time. For now, whether you are a social entrepreneur, a funder, a scaler, or an enthusiastic student of social change, we’d love to hear from you at Skoll.org/connect or in the comments below.
For all the above, please share your thoughts in our open referral form at https://skoll.org/connect/. We can’t guarantee a response in every case, but we can assure you that our team will review the information you share, and we will reach out if we see an opportunity to continue the conversation. Thank you for your contribution to our network and for the role you play in creating a sustainable world of peace and prosperity for all.
