CARES

The project implements a support program for social cooperatives that manage confiscated assets, combining (i) an organizational diagnostic, (ii) structured training, and (iii) follow-up mentorship. The impact of offering training + mentorship is evaluated through a randomized controlled trial (RCT), explicitly inspired by prior experimental work on management and organizational support.

Recruitment is carried out by the University of Siena together with project partners (Fondazione Con Il Sud, Banca Etica, Fondazione Intesa Sanpaolo, Fondazione Vismara, LIBERA, and benchmark cooperatives such as GOEL). Invitations are sent to cooperatives that already completed the project’s “economic profile” and “social impact” questionnaires or interviews when available. These instruments constitute baseline measures collected prior to random assignment.

Interested cooperatives are informed upfront that participation entails the following conditions: (i) all cooperatives will receive a free diagnostic and improvement plan; (ii) only a randomly selected subset will also receive training and mentorship; and (iii) all participating cooperatives will be monitored for research purposes.

Delivery of the training and mentorship is outsourced to A|Cube, an Italian incubator and consulting firm specialized in social innovation and cooperatives.

The intervention is structured in three phases: (1) Diagnostic, (2) Webinar series, and (3) Mentorship.

Phase 1: Diagnostic and improvement plan (all participants).
Each cooperative is assessed on its management, finances, and social mission. The diagnostic produces a tailored improvement plan focused on four areas: strategic planning, financial management, communication for community engagement, and fundraising and diversification of funding sources.

After recruitment into the experimental sample, cooperatives are randomly assigned into two arms: control cooperatives that receive the organizational diagnosis and the improvement plan only; treatment cooperatives that receive the organizational diagnosis, the improvement plan plus the webinar training and mentorship. To ensure balance and comparability between groups, random assignment will be stratified by (i) geographical area --- whether the cooperative is located in Center–North or Southern Italy --- and (ii) cooperative size, measured by the number of workers and grouped into terciles (small/medium/large).

Phase 2: Webinar training (treatment only).
Treated cooperatives are offered uniform training, identical across all treated units, while personalization occurs through the improvement plan and mentorship activities in Phase 3. Training covers four core areas – strategic planning, financial management, communication, and fundraising – and is delivered through four online sessions, each lasting two hours. The content combines international models (e.g., ILO’s Start and Improve Your Business) with needs identified through interviews and questionnaires on the economic profile and on social impact. Each module blends theory with practical exercises, tools, and interactive group work. Attendance and participation indicators (attendance, exercises, group work) are collected and added to the dataset.

Phase 3: Mentorship (treatment only).
Treated cooperatives participate in a ten-month online mentorship program designed to help them translate webinar insights and the improvement plan into tangible organizational changes. Cooperatives are grouped into small clusters of up to eight cooperatives, based on priorities and location; each cluster is supported by an A|Cube mentor, with attendance registered. Each cluster participates in 10 online sessions, 2 hours each. Each cooperative works both on its own priorities (from the improvement plan) and on the priorities of other group members, aiming to speed adoption through knowledge spillovers and collaborative problem-solving.

Follow-up and measurement schedule.
Both treatment and control cooperatives are monitored over the next two to three fiscal years. All cooperatives are asked to complete the social impact questionnaire after the mentorship phase ends (for treated cooperatives) and at the corresponding time for control cooperatives, and then annually over the following two to three fiscal years, to track longer-run changes and compare outcomes between treatment and control groups.

2026-01-23

2026-12-31

Net Operating Income: Total Production Value - Total Production Costs.
Operating Cost Ratio: Total Production Cost/Total Production Value.
Overall Debt Ratio: Total Liabilities/Total Assets
Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of the Funding Sources (self-reported).
Perceived Social Return: Respondent’s self-assessed perception of the social benefits generated by the cooperative’s activities. Scale: 1 = No impact; 2 = Low; 3 = Moderate; 4 = Significant; 5 = High.
Perceived difficulty of the communication campaign (self-reported): 1 = None, 2 = Low, 3 = Moderate, 4 = High, 5 = Extreme.
Perceived difficulty in networking: 1 = None, 2 = Low, 3 = Moderate, 4 = High, 5 = Extreme.
Integration of vulnerable people (self-reported): 1 = Formal or Minimal; 2 = Functional: 3 = Participatory; 4 = Full.

Net Operating Income: Total Production Value - Total Production Costs.
Operating Cost Ratio: Total Production Cost/Total Production Value.
Overall Debt Ratio: Total Liabilities/Total Assets
Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of the Funding Sources (self-reported).
Perceived Social Return: Respondent’s self-assessed perception of the social benefits generated by the cooperative’s activities. Scale: 1 = No impact; 2 = Low; 3 = Moderate; 4 = Significant; 5 = High.
Perceived difficulty of the communication campaign (self-reported): 1 = None, 2 = Low, 3 = Moderate, 4 = High, 5 = Extreme.
Perceived difficulty in networking: 1 = None, 2 = Low, 3 = Moderate, 4 = High, 5 = Extreme.
Integration of vulnerable people (self-reported): 1 = Formal or Minimal; 2 = Functional: 3 = Participatory; 4 = Full.

The project implements a support program for social cooperatives that manage confiscated assets, combining (i) an organizational diagnostic, (ii) structured training, and (iii) follow-up mentorship. The impact of offering training + mentorship is evaluated through a randomized controlled trial (RCT), explicitly inspired by prior experimental work on management and organizational support.

Recruitment is carried out by the University of Siena together with project partners (Fondazione Con Il Sud, Banca Etica, Fondazione Intesa Sanpaolo, Fondazione Vismara, LIBERA, and benchmark cooperatives such as GOEL). Invitations are sent to cooperatives that already completed the project’s “economic profile” and “social impact” questionnaires or interviews when available. These instruments constitute baseline measures collected prior to random assignment.

Interested cooperatives are informed upfront that participation entails the following conditions: (i) all cooperatives will receive a free diagnostic and improvement plan; (ii) only a randomly selected subset will also receive training and mentorship; and (iii) all participating cooperatives will be monitored for research purposes.

Delivery of the training and mentorship is outsourced to A|Cube, an Italian incubator and consulting firm specialized in social innovation and cooperatives.

The intervention is structured in three phases: (1) Diagnostic, (2) Webinar series, and (3) Mentorship.

Phase 1: Diagnostic and improvement plan (all participants).
Each cooperative is assessed on its management, finances, and social mission. The diagnostic produces a tailored improvement plan focused on four areas: strategic planning, financial management, communication for community engagement, and fundraising and diversification of funding sources.

After recruitment into the experimental sample, cooperatives are randomly assigned into two arms: control cooperatives that receive the organizational diagnosis and the improvement plan only; treatment cooperatives that receive the organizational diagnosis, the improvement plan plus the webinar training and mentorship. To ensure balance and comparability between groups, random assignment will be stratified by (i) geographical area --- whether the cooperative is located in Center–North or Southern Italy --- and (ii) cooperative size, measured by the number of workers and grouped into terciles (small/medium/large).

Phase 2: Webinar training (treatment only).
Treated cooperatives are offered uniform training, identical across all treated units, while personalization occurs through the improvement plan and mentorship activities in Phase 3. Training covers four core areas – strategic planning, financial management, communication, and fundraising – and is delivered through four online sessions, each lasting two hours. The content combines international models (e.g., ILO’s Start and Improve Your Business) with needs identified through interviews and questionnaires on the economic profile and on social impact. Each module blends theory with practical exercises, tools, and interactive group work. Attendance and participation indicators (attendance, exercises, group work) are collected and added to the dataset.

Phase 3: Mentorship (treatment only).
Treated cooperatives participate in a ten-month online mentorship program designed to help them translate webinar insights and the improvement plan into tangible organizational changes. Cooperatives are grouped into small clusters of up to eight cooperatives, based on priorities and location; each cluster is supported by an A|Cube mentor, with attendance registered. Each cluster participates in 10 online sessions, 2 hours each. Each cooperative works both on its own priorities (from the improvement plan) and on the priorities of other group members, aiming to speed adoption through knowledge spillovers and collaborative problem-solving.

Follow-up and measurement schedule.
Both treatment and control cooperatives are monitored over the next two to three fiscal years. All cooperatives are asked to complete the social impact questionnaire after the mentorship phase ends (for treated cooperatives) and at the corresponding time for control cooperatives, and then annually over the following two to three fiscal years, to track longer-run changes and compare outcomes between treatment and control groups.

Not available

After recruitment into the experimental sample, cooperatives are randomly assigned to two arms: control cooperatives that receive the improvement plan only, and treatment cooperatives that receive the improvement plan plus the webinar training and mentorship.

To ensure balance and comparability between groups, random assignment is stratified by (i) geographical area—whether the cooperative is located in Center–North or Southern Italy—and (ii) cooperative size, measured by the number of workers and grouped into terciles (small/medium/large) based on the baseline distribution.

Within each stratum, cooperatives are randomly assigned to treatment or control with equal probability. The stratified random assignment is implemented using Stata 17.

The unit of randomization is the social cooperative.

Yes

We use a single clustering level for both treated and control cooperatives. Standard errors are clustered at the mentoring-group level to account for potential correlation among cooperatives that share the same mentor and group interactions. Treated cooperatives are organized into mentoring groups of up to eight units. In contrast, control cooperatives do not participate in mentoring groups and therefore each forms a singleton cluster. Overall, this results in at most five mentoring-group clusters among treated cooperatives and 35 singleton clusters among control cooperatives, for a total of up to 40 clusters.

Since the main outcomes are observed for up to three fiscal years before and three fiscal years after the intervention, the panel includes up to 420 cooperative–year observations, corresponding to 70 social cooperatives followed for up to six fiscal years. The panel is unbalanced if some years are missing.

We invited all 242 cooperatives in the matched LIBERA–RUNTS dataset. Accounting for attrition, we expect to enroll up to 70 cooperatives, with approximately 35 randomly assigned to the treatment arm and 35 to the control arm.

We will invite all 242 cooperatives in the matched LIBERA–RUNTS dataset. However, participation is voluntary and we had substantial attrition, so the final enrolled sample is expected to be of 70 social cooperatives at maximum. Because the effective sample size is largely determined by take-up rather than by design, and because we do not have reliable prior information on take-up rates and outcome variability for this population, we are not able to conduct a meaningful ex ante power analysis.

Pre-Analysis Plan CARES