You want to improve your social impact strategy. How can you use design thinking to do it?
Improving your social impact strategy may seem daunting, but by incorporating design thinking, you can foster innovation and create more effective solutions. Design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving that involves understanding the needs of those you're aiming to help, ideating creative solutions, prototyping, and testing. It's a process that encourages organizations to think outside the box and develop more empathetic and sustainable social initiatives.
To truly enhance your social impact, start with empathy. Design thinking revolves around a deep understanding of the people and communities you serve. Engage with them directly to learn about their experiences, challenges, and needs. This firsthand knowledge is invaluable; it allows you to create solutions that resonate on a personal level and address the core issues at hand. Remember, effective social impact is not just about providing a service or product; it's about making a meaningful connection with the individuals affected by your work.
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Community involvement can, and should, extend beyond extracting information when developing your social impact strategy. You can incorporate a variety of participatory approaches to make sure the engagement is beneficial for you and your community members. For example: Create a community advisory board where you compensate members for: - helping you define your program goals and KPIs - analyzing results of program evaluation projects - contributing to conversations around resource and budget allocation. This approach will ensure that your strategy is designed around the perspectives and priorities of your community.
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Center humans, intersectional and marginalized humans, in the design process. If you can, take this as far as you can with either ethnographic research (deep interviews in their home so they can describe all elements of their experience) or better, learn how/when/why humans interact with your product service, and design it for them. Companies are often surprised to learn so much about what it's like to use something as simple as a diaper and what else is contributing to its effectiveness, ease of use, and sustainable impact.
Once you've gained insights through empathy, move to ideation. This phase is all about generating a wide range of ideas, even those that might seem outlandish at first. Encourage creative thinking and don't dismiss any suggestions prematurely. The goal is to think broadly and without constraints, which can lead to innovative approaches that might not have been considered otherwise. This is where the collaborative nature of design thinking shines, as diverse perspectives can combine to form unique solutions.
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In my experience, incorporating these strategies into your approach, you can use design thinking to enhance your social impact- Prototype Solutions-In the prototyping phase, create tangible representations of your ideas. This allows you to test and refine your ideas before implementing them on a larger scale. Test and Refine-Gather feedback from stakeholder and use it to refine your solutions. This iterative process ensures that your solutions are effective and meet the needs of the community. Collaborate with Others-Design thinking encourages collaboration. Work with other organizations, government agencies, or businesses to create more impactful solutions. Collaboration can lead to more resources, more ideas, and a greater reach.
After ideating, it's time to prototype. Prototyping involves creating simple, low-cost versions of your ideas to explore their potential. These models don't have to be perfect; they just need to be good enough to test and learn from. By prototyping, you can quickly see which concepts have merit and which might need rethinking. This hands-on approach saves time and resources in the long run, as it helps refine your social impact strategies before full-scale implementation.
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Barry B.
CEO @ Association Ventures | Adjunct Professor Social Entrepreneurship University of Denver
Prototyping is vital in the Accelerate Impact Model. I create simple, cost-effective models to test and refine ideas swiftly. This method allows us to identify viable concepts early, saving time and resources. By rapidly prototyping, we gather crucial feedback that informs our strategies, ensuring that we invest in solutions with the most social impact potential before full-scale implementation.
Testing is a crucial step in design thinking. Take your prototypes and try them out with your target audience. Observe their interactions, gather feedback, and be prepared to go back to the drawing board if necessary. This iterative process ensures that your social impact strategies are not only well-intentioned but also effective and user-friendly. Testing allows you to learn from real-world experiences and make necessary adjustments, which is essential for creating lasting social change.
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Testing and learning help in identifying successful areas and areas that need to be halted for wider impact. This means in working on an impact project, you need to gather feedback. For example, whilst I was designing the structure of the Sara Foundation Africa's Career Advancement Program (CAP), through gathering feedback and testing the model, I was able to identify that a stage-by-stage structure of 20% learning and 80% practice would give a better outcome than traditional 100% tech learning programs. This feedback made CAP stand out as an outlier from myriads of tech training initiatives in Nigeria. In essence, don't just execute and end there, test your hypothesis, gather feedback, and learn from this feedback to improve your model.
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Barry B.
CEO @ Association Ventures | Adjunct Professor Social Entrepreneurship University of Denver
Testing is fundamental in my design thinking process. By trialing prototypes with our target audience, we gather valuable feedback and observe real-world interactions, ensuring our strategies are effective and user-centric. This iterative process is crucial for refining our social impact initiatives, allowing us to make necessary adjustments based on practical insights. It’s a practice that turns good intentions into impactful, lasting change.
With a well-tested solution, you're ready to implement and scale your social impact strategy. However, even at this stage, design thinking advocates for continuous reflection and iteration. As your solution reaches more people, new challenges and opportunities will arise. Stay adaptable and responsive to feedback, always looking for ways to improve and expand your impact. Successful scaling often requires tweaking your approach as you grow, ensuring that your social initiatives remain relevant and beneficial.
Finally, embrace continuous reflection in your social impact journey. Design thinking is not a linear process; it's cyclical and ongoing. Regularly take stock of your strategies, assess their effectiveness, and consider how they can evolve. This mindset of constant improvement will help you stay ahead of the curve and ensure that your efforts are making the most significant possible difference in the lives of those you aim to support.
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Barry B.
CEO @ Association Ventures | Adjunct Professor Social Entrepreneurship University of Denver
Continuous reflection is integral to my approach in social impact. Design thinking, being cyclical, demands we regularly evaluate and adapt our strategies. This commitment to ongoing improvement ensures our initiatives remain effective and responsive to community needs, keeping us ahead in making a meaningful difference. Embracing this iterative process is crucial for sustaining impact and adapting to emerging challenges.