How to increase our social impact exponentially?

How to increase our social impact exponentially?

Everyone wants to leave a legacy and contribute to something meaningful. Many companies, non-profit organizations, donors or whole countries are asking how to measure social impact and increase it considerably?

The problem is that this question seems to confuse most of people, and it seems to require considerable time investment to get into the details of practicing social impact measurement. Therefore, we need to invest into producing understandable and short explanations, but without the oversimplification. This article claims that it is useful to take an outside view and start with prioritizing the most important problems.

Inside view versus Outside view

Many organizations want to get a stamp of approval that their activities are efficient and have an impact in real life. This need is understandable, but one can start with taking the “outside view” first – and start asking what is the most pressing need in my region, country or globally?

The famous author of Thinking Fast and Slow, a Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman describes how he failed to estimate how long will it take him and his co-authors to write a curriculum and a text book on the topic of decision making and critical thinking. Their estimates where somewhere between one and three years. But when he prompted a curriculum development expert to think of how long does it usually take to write a text book (and example of an outside view) he paused for a long time and said something shocking: maybe 40% of the teams failed to ever finish the book and the rest took somewhere between 7-10 years. But the same expert gave an estimate in the 1-3 year range, when he took the optimistic inside view.

Exploitation versus Exploration

Many of us are spending most of our days at improving our current activities, projects and daily routines. In other words, we ask how to be more efficient at what we do and how to exploit the skills and opportunities that our current situation and assets allow to make the most of what we have. But we should spend 10-20% of our time in exploration activities – this means learning or unlearning new skills, and “learning to learn” more effectively, or brainstorming brand new projects.

The famous Pareto distribution or Pareto Rule describes how 80% of results come from 20% of effort. The economist, Vilfredo Pareto observed that 80% of land in his home country Italy is owned by 20% of population. Many events and aspects of our world follow similarly uneven distribution.

We could think of e.g. 90/10 split – if we invest constantly 10% of our time in learning and exploration of new opportunities it might bring us 90% of new business and increased results in the future.

It might be difficult to take the outside view on our cherished and long-term “business as usual” project or a cash-cows. But we could start at “the edges of our organization” and invite new thinking and models to explore the possibilities for a greater social impact when planning new and future projects.

This article aims to help with fresh thinking about social impact, but at the same time it aims keep it simple and accessible to any practitioner. We want to explain some tools used by people in the Effective Altruism community that can help us to prioritize our interventions and connect them to Sustainable Development Goals framework.

How much good can you do with an additional euro or person?

Imagine some extreme and hypothetical example: There are only two scientists in the whole world who work on reversing aging - the cause of death for 66% of global population. And they operate on an annual budget of 100,000 euros.

We can suspect that they might be underfunded and would need additional funding to buy more equipment or hire more people. We can also find it strange that there are only two people doing this in the whole world. Maybe all the other scientists already concluded that to reverse aging is impossible, or that it requires tremendous amounts of time and money.

If we take an outside view – a view that an impartial donor or an investor might take, we can ask: How much good would I create if I 1) doubled the budget of those two scientists, 2) found another skilled scientist for them, 3) promoted their work in public, 4) helped them to create a company or NGO, or 5) joined them and worked directly on their research or assist them with operations?

In other words, you can make a positive impact directly with your work and career, indirectly with influencing and promoting the cause, and by donating or investing for the cause. You can also combine these approaches.

The most important realization is that very impactful projects and organizations will be rare and thus Pareto-distributed. It means they don’t follow a normal, Gauss Curve and bell-shaped distributions but a very “long-tailed” distribution (with a few very large outliers – e.g. a project that is 1000x more effective than the median one).

Finding projects with extraordinary impact is like meeting a person who is 200 meters or 20,000 meters tall. Well that is absurd in terms of height, but not in the cases of wealth distribution or social impact or popularity of musicians. Our brains cannot comprehend these differences – but they are nevertheless striking: For example, Oxfam reported in 2017 that the richest 8 people own as much as half of the planet combined.  In a “Pareto World” averages of e.g. wealth size are much less meaningful than medians.

One can find a similar situation in development cooperation and poverty eradication programs. Some economists, such as William Easterly or Ester Duflo, are famous for criticizing development projects e.g. in Africa, where some big farm or a big dam, or any so called “white elephant” flagship projects, is built by foreign donors in cooperation with local authorities. But often the project fails to deliver because of mismanagement or corruption, and sometimes money are siphoned off to Swiss bank accounts. However, these economists criticize maybe the average development project, but discount the fact that some projects might be 1000x more effective than others.

For example, Viktor Zhdanov, a Deputy Minister of Health for the Soviet Union, once proposed a novel idea to World Health Organization – a project to eradicate smallpox from the planet. Despite the Cold War this idea was implemented by an international team of doctors and experts from all around the world and managed by an American, Donald Henderson. The project lasted for 10 years, and the last case of small pox was eradicated in Somalia in 1977.

It was the first disease that the humanity eradicated from earth. And some estimates say that since then the eradication saved around 60 million lives on planet, or 5x more than a hypothetical world peace would save. The program was so cost-effective that if development cooperation didn’t produce any other benefit, only this program, it would be still very cost-effective according to Western standards for costs to save lives e.g. by improving road infrastructure.

Look for the most neglected, solvable and important problems

As we mentioned earlier – there are huge differences between a typical project and an extraordinary project. We can say the same about comparing various problems, some might be much more important than others. For example, over a million people in the world die each year from traffic related accidents, and 4.6 million people die from small particles pollution – this is almost 10x more than people who die from violence globally. And people who die from aging are then again in another magnitude – some 36 million people each year.

I picked up these extreme examples just to make a broader point – in any sector or cause area we can find specific causes or problems that are orders of magnitude more neglected, or more important than others.

Take the cause of animal rights. Around 3400 farm animals are killed in the US for every dog that is euthanized in the animal shelter. But the biggest 90 animal shelters receive together 1.2 billion dollars every year. Compared to that, the biggest farm animal advocacy organizations receive together only 19 million dollars of donations each year. So there is a three orders of magnitude difference between various types of animals who might suffer (dogs and cats vs farm animals) and there is two orders of magnitude difference in funding. If we add importance of the problem (number of animals killed) and neglectedness (annual budgets for these two types of charities), together these would make five orders of magnitude. This is exactly what the ITN Framework does.

ITN Frameworks stands for Importance-Tractability-Neglectedness Framework, and works in a similar way as a Richter earthquake magnitude scale – where the difference between two points is 10x – or one magnitude.

So if you are a donor or a company that wants to conduct a brainstorming session about new future projects and cause areas that would radically increase your impact a good way to start is to rate various problems on these four criteria: Importance, Tractability (Solvability), Neglectedness and Personal Fit (how close it is to your mission, interest or skillset).

In our example above, if you are a person who just wants to decrease animal suffering and you have no preference of dogs or cats above other animals, if you donate towards farm animal advocacy groups your euro or dollar will travel further than if you donate towards animal shelters. Actually much further, like 100,000x further – this difference of five orders of magnitude is so huge that our brains are not accustomed to work with these numbers and we experience something called scope insensitivity – a cognitive bias also described by Kahneman and his friend Tversky.

But what about Solvability? We can ask a simple question and make a very crude estimate – How much of the problem would we solve if we doubled the current funding that goes to those organizations? For example, if we estimate with the 10% probability that doubling the funding for organization that advocate for farm animal welfare, would reduce the number of killed animals by 10% the total expected value is 10% x 10% = 1% reduction in killed animals. But since there are 9.2 billions of farm animals slaughtered in the US alone, it would mean saving 92 million animal lives for another 19 million dollars (doubling the total current budget of organizations that deal with this cause in the US). Or almost 5 farm animal lives saved per dollar.

It needs to be stressed here, that this is only statistical approximation and many people would object to these “cold hearted” calculations. But they are important to help us to combat our cognitive biases like scope insensitivity and allow us to be actually more emphatic to others.

But it is important to understand that our resources in terms of time, attention, career capital and social capital are limited. And there are many opportunities that might produce results that are orders of magnitude more beneficial and socially impactful. An illustration of this thinking is the ranking of Sustainable Development Goals and its targets by Copenhaagen Consensus Center – their economists estimated that e.g. tripling preschool education in Africa would bring 33 dollars of benefit for every dollar invested. Compared to that increasing secondary school enrollment would bring “only” 4 dollars of benefit for every dollar invested.

The pattern in similar rankings is straightforward – it is cheaper to invest early than later – in preschools and primary schools then universities. One can suspect that it is due to decreasing marginal returns – early interventions might produce much more value than if one “comes relatively late to the party” – or to the process of learning.

Again this doesn’t mean that we shall abandon for example the ambitious goal of universal secondary education enrollment – but that preschool is much cheaper and it shall have a larger weight in our portfolio of interventions.

How to scale our solutions exponentially?

If we increase the number of our beneficiaries, people who use our solution or are enrolled in our program, we talk about the breadth of impact. If we talk about improving the quality of their lives, we talk about the depth of our impact.

Increasing the number of beneficiaries is not the same as scaling our impact. Scaling means doing more with less – it implies reduction of costs per every new marginal customer or beneficiary.

For example, in our Sote ICT Clubs in Kenya we had in 2017 around 1000 students at 12 schools and our annual budget for this activity was around 50,000 euros. So the cost per student was very roughly 50 euros. At our Sote Hub in Voi town we had a community of around 50 members who came repeatedly to our events and were interested in developing their own startups and pitched at our competitions. And running Sote Hub also cost around 50,000 euros a year. So the cost per each active member was very roughly 1000 euros.

We have around 500 members who signed up for Sote Hub membership, we also had around 500 visitors who took part at our events in 2017. But still in this case, the cost per member or visitor is around 100 euros.

But how could we provide our services and acquire new beneficiaries 10x cheaper? These questions are crucial if we want to grow exponentially. To scale Sote ICT Clubs or to scale Sote Hubs would mean to find ways to reduce the marginal cost of acquiring new members, opening IT clubs at new schools, or creating a community of entrepreneurs in new towns more cheaply.

One clear answer is to digitize our services more. For example, every lecture we put on youtube can be viewed by many more people than just the event at a particular school or day in Sote Hub.

Another way is to use the pull approach instead of push approach – instead of going to new schools and proposing new Sote ICT Clubs and then equipping them – we can organize more Startup Idea competitions and open them to schools outside our current program. This way we will gain contact to a broader pool of new motivated teachers. And we will pull the teachers and students who are already motivated but lacked means to join our competitions or to create communities that are similar to ours.

The third option is to build a movement of teachers that would self-organize some regular peer learning groups in their towns or villages and start their own new Sote ICT Clubs.

The fourth option is to empower these teachers further by certification to start their own franchise and somehow formalize the informal communities.

The fifth option is to nurture online communities and platforms where e.g. students and teachers compete in innovative content creation or problem-based learning.

The sixth option is to create open source material that can be used by other actors and thus spread our indirect reach.

Out of these options we feel that a greater digitalization, community-building and organizing competitions are the three main elements. We are also particularly interested in a certain time of competitions like X Prize modeled after DARPA tournaments – that aims to produce very concrete solutions that are radically cheaper due to exponential technologies.

If we were to take an outside view – we could spread our program to primary schools where the costs of nurturing digital and business skills might be cheaper and benefits greater. We might also focus more heavily on coding and STEM to bridge the numeracy gaps between rural and elite schools.

But all these options are good candidates when we think how to scale our impact – spread our program to additional beneficiaries but reduce the costs 10x at the same time. This is a challenge that needs radically different ways of thinking and doing.

I will write about why competitions are important for scaling innovation in a follow up article. For now, I wanted to outline ways how organizations could aim to improve their impact by at least an order of magnitude. One way is to focus on new projects that try to solve an order of magnitude more important, neglected or solvable problem. Another one is to look for solutions that scale – and reduce the costs of acquiring new clients, or beneficiaries by an order of magnitude or more.



Author: Jakub Šimek / Pontis Foundation

 

Share this
The UAE: From Fossil Fuel Present To Zero Carbon Future Community of people to share ideas and projects
Related Posts:

When will animal cruelty go out of fashion?

Every year, more than 150 billion animals are slaughtered, ending their extremely short lives having endured unspeakable suffering under barbaric factory-farming conditions, to satisfy insatiable human appetites for food and clothing.

SDG8: Economic growth for sustainable future

Although the number of workers living in extreme poverty is showing a substantial decline over the past 25 years, and the middle class now makes up more than 34 percent of total employment, the world economy is still facing serious challenges ahead.

Initiatives and obstacles to reaching SDG4

Every single country in the world is challenged to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. One of those goals, SDG4, is concerned with education policy issues which are not part of the international development agenda, but are of great value to the OECD member and partner countries.

Are bike lanes are as sustainable as they seem?

In the Strong Towns podcast, “Are Bike Lanes White Lanes,” speaker and author of the book “Bike Lanes are White Lanes,” Melody Hoffmann identifies a critical urban design problem in bike lane infrastructure—addressing in-depth how bike lanes are not as “sustainable” as they seem, and can often deepen issues of classism, racism, and displacement.

Thinking about flight shaming, ethical travel and consumption options

So it seems traveling by train for longer distances takes around 10x longer than flight but is around 10x less carbon intensive. So yes, traveling by train can be a good choice for activists like Greta Thunberg, but also for regular people. But in another article I read that Greta Thunberg wants to avoid flying to the US and travel by a boat.

How can complexity science improve education?

One frequent mistake in social innovations and education, is to assume one-fits-all approach to solving social problems. We need to realize that managing in complex systems requires radically different tools than managing in complicated systems or chaotic systems.

Millennials are driving interest in sustainable investment

Sustainable, socially responsible or ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing is on the rise. A recent survey from Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing has found that millennials are leading the way with nearly nine in ten (86%) of them being interested in sustainable investing.

How can Slovakia contribute to global prosperity after #AllForJan?

Slovakia is a relatively young country, still in its twenties. For most of our recent history since the late 1990s we prided ourselves in being a “Tatra Tiger”, a fast growing emerging economy with a strong manufacturing base (think Volkswagen) and highly skilled and productive workers at business process offshoring centers (think Accenture).

Interview with Andrea Casadio, the creator of AllerGenio

How to help people who are affected by allergies and food intolerance?
A search engine can identify allergens in a database of more than eighteen thousand ingredients, scientifically validated by the laboratory of Human Health Sciences, University of Florence: this is AllerGenio , online platform which is a great help for allergic and intolerant people , since it recognizes the substances to be avoided in food.

You are What You Eat and Why Do You Eat?

The idea that you are what you eat has been a prevailing belief in many cultures throughout the history. For example, the ancient Aztecs would eat the brain of their rivals because they believed it gave them the wisdom and knowledge of the enemy.

Assuming global responsibility by closing all the loops

Closing all the loops is a very similar idea of assuming global responsibility – for the whole of our actions but also for people in faraway places. Closing all the loops thus shall be also an integral part of Agenda 2030 and applies to various Sustainable Development Goals, beyond the SDG12 of Responsible Consumption.

ASSOCIAZIONE RiSvolta – The Colors of Rights

The RiSvolta Association is a non profit social promotion association that aims to build a society in which human and civil rights are recognized, promoted and guaranteed for all citizens, without discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other personal and social condition, in line with what is established by Article 3 of the Italian Constitution.

Sustainable modes of city

Creating an intelligent human society enables the development of sustainable cities in terms of environmental protection and economic and technological development. Sustainable cities rely on the digital city infrastructure to build intelligent buildings, transport systems, schools, and businesses.

Risk less as you go sustainable

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has gained a growing importance, during the last years, among academics, managers and citizens and its impact on firm’s performance is the center of several debates worldwide. As a matter of fact, according to the majority of CEOs worldwide, CSR is considered an “important” or “very important” task for their firms (UN Global Compact-Accenture).

Towards Sharing Economy: Joy of a shared toy

With each passing day, the world is more and more convinced that the economy system we are used to living in, is not sustainable. Climate change and resource depletion, followed by enormous consumption are some of the main problems that the world is facing nowadays. But now, more than ever, there is an emergence of companies that are moving further away from this way of doing business and might have a solution for these problems. Those companies are the main representatives of sharing economy.

7 CSR Trends that will dominate 2019

2019 will be a promising year of corporate citizenry and impact. Reporting, Community engagement, employee training, betterment campaigns and market feedback are all aligning to support a higher level of CSR activity than ever before.

The Collettivo Donne Matera

The goal of the Collettivo is to contribute to the creation of a society that is as fair and inclusive as possible where social support, public health and education services, economic resources and employment opportunities can be guaranteed and adequate to a dignified life for all.

There are results in SDG action!

The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2018 provides insight of the progress in the third year of implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Slovak SDG Priorities

On 13 November we at the Pontis Foundation organized our annual CEE CSR Summit in Bratislava and also held a discussion roundtable on SDGs.

Getting to know “Il Sicomoro”, a Social Cooperative in Matera

“Il Sicomoro” is the Italian translation of the sycamore, which looks like a fig tree and it is very popular in the Middle East. It is a common “character” along the streets in Palestine, where it leaves splashes of colour on those biblical landscapes, apparently very similar to the ones in our Lucania.

Sustainable Cooking

When talking about SDG2, we always talk about how to prevent world hunger and what can be done to save people from it. We talk about ways of helping people who don't have enough to eat and improving the access of all people to a healthy diet, but we rarely speak about one way that can also have a positive impact on ending hunger – sustainable cooking.

That’s Absurd! The “Assurd” risto-pub experience with sustainability

On average, income inequality increased by 11 per cent in developing countries between 1990 and 2010.
Disability is referenced in various parts of the SDGs and specifically in those related to growth and employment, education, inequality, accessibility of human settlements, as well as data collection and monitoring of the SDGs.

The Conad sustainability challenge

Conad, the colossal of large retailers, has joined the Ecologistico2 program, devised by ECR Italia, the association that regroups the main production and distribution companies to improve the processes and efficiency of the supply chain, from the producer to the consumer.

Pagpag

Have you ever wondered whatever happened to the left-over food you did not finish in fast food restaurants? You may think they would have been thrown away and discarded for good. But what happens next is something you ought to know.

Community of people to share ideas and projects

Among the trends related to sustainability that have been proliferating in the last years, certainly the shared creative spaces stand out. One of these is “Casa Netural”, a house in Matera in southern Italy, hosting people from all around the world...

SDGs Integration: How to Do It Right?

Current tendency towards sustainability promotes versatile ways for responsibility and integration of SDGs into business models, organizational culture, policy making, urban planning and spatial development...

The Decades Long Quest for a Digital Aristotle

Aristotle was probably the best tutor in the world and the most knowledgeable person of his times. But still his student, Alexander the Great, went on to conquer half of the world. Being smart it seems, doesn’t automatically translate into being...

SDG 2: Sustainable Food Production

Agriculture’s enormous energy consumption is related not only to food production, but also in large part to food distribution. The environmental benefits of organic food production can be lost if the food is constantly being transported thousands of miles to reach consumers. Buying local seasonal food can be an...

Collaboration for the SDGs

Monitoring and encouragement of SDG practices at European level is a challenge, as it is both international and national level activity. The alliance SDG Watch Europe has a goal to hold governments and the EU to account for the implementation of the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development. It consists of...

The Sustainable Economy Is a Donut!

The objective number 12 of the Sustainable Development Goals aims to ensure sustainable patterns of consumption and production. Why is this an indispensable requirement for sustainable development? Because it is estimated that the world population will reach 9.6 billion by 2050, with this figure we would need the...

Closing the Loop: A Key Business Model for SDG 12

"Unless we go to Circular it's game over for the planet; it's game over for society." These are the opening words of the world’s first feature-length documentary film on the circular economy, called Closing the Loop, due for public release on Earth...

'Microcredit' to Serve the Sustainable Development

Since 2001, the Italian Banking Association has undertaken an in-depth study on the subject of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and its strategic importance within the modern banking business model. Consequently, in recent years an...

The Need to Innovate Beauty Industry

Have you ever thought of the highly underestimated cost we pay for everything we consume? And I am not talking here about the price we pay for solely acquiring goods. What I have in mind is slightly more overlooked and all-encompassing, which is each product's afterlife cost, e.g. the amount of resources it takes to...

The Future of Sustainable Finance

Last week I attended the London meeting of the The Future of Sustainable Finance at the G7. The panel of knowledgeable experts provided a fascinating discussion. It touched on many of the areas raised in the detailed 2018 report by the EU’s High-Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance. For financial institutions, the report...

Are Sustainable Development Goals Material?

The SDGs already achieved the significant work of creating a common platform of targets and indicators shared across governments, institutions, academia, investors, media, and business. And this is not rhetoric. In the past few months, I’ve been in several conversations with business, academia, and investors concerning...

Can We Make Zero Poverty World or Not?

Despite the on-trend rhetoric and optimism, the chances of (all but) ending absolute poverty in our generation are slim. The chances of ending poverty altogether are zero. The closer we get to ending extreme poverty, the harder it is going to be to do it. We're going to have to pretty much end violent conflict...

SDGs for the Generation Z

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals were adopted in 2015 as the universal call to action to end poverty and hunger, protect the planet and ensure inclusion, peace and prosperity for all by 2030. Agenda 2030 is playing a very important role in shaping tomorrow’s living conditions. However, without active individual...

Focus on Sustainable Cities and Communities

Cities have often been a vehicle for generating new ideas, commerce, culture, science, productivity and social development, and up to the present they have also enabled people to improve their social and economic conditions. However, many challenges persist to keep city centres as places not dangerous for both lands...

Changing Mobility Habits for a Healthier Life

Contributing to the third Sustainable Development Goal capital city of Lithuania is creating a sustainable urban mobility plan (SUMP) for its inhabitants. SUMP has to encompass various mobility modes and variations and one of the themes of the city strategy is to plan how to change people’s behaviour in mobility...

Food and the Sustainable Development Goals

Food and agriculture feature prominently in many of the Sustainable Development Goals, because they are interconnected with almost all aspects of economy, environment and society, from hunger, malnutrition, desertification, sustainable water use, loss of biodiversity, to overconsumption, obesity and...