Slice of the Pie-Social Impact & Technology
“There is a way to do it better…..Find it.”- Thomas A. Edison
In the Pre-Covid era, two interesting developments took place in the retail therapy industry. First, the malls in Mumbai gained permissions to operate for 18 hours in a day. (Restaurants had been grappling for increased working hours for like forever). Second, there were installations of vending machines containing essential items in housing societies. The first one happened to ensure that the customer could spend more time and money in malls. A six hour expansion of work time meant potential for 33 percent extra sales. Installation of vending machines led to ensuring that there was additional use of technology. Shopping choices were transferred to the hands of the user sans field support.
The idea was to apply concepts of technology sales or online sales to the brick and mortar establishments. It was also about transferring ownership to the user.
The social enterprise believer in me started drawing parallels . It started asking if we could apply the same concepts to social impact space.
Can we use technology to expand the duration of intervention? Typically a social impact professional spends 7–8 hours working with the communities . Timings are 11–6 or 10–5 during the day. Sundays when availability of beneficiaries is the maximum are mostly non-working days. In various interventions its difficult to involve the male members of the family during the day time as most of them are out for work.(this is just one example of restricted availability. Water availability, picking children from school, lunch preparation, performing daily chores etc are some others) Clearly there is an opportunity to engage lost. Opportunity in terms of increasing the duration of the intervention and involving other important beneficiaries in the value chain.
Can we transfer the ownership of impact to the users? The reliance of social work has been heavily on the door to door campaigns for both need/demand integration and benefit rendering /supply provision. A community worker would go to the homes find the beneficiary and disseminate the information using collaterals or dialogue. The approach helped build trust but had limitation in terms of the amount of physical interaction that is humanly and economically possible. Loss of information during transit or translation was also an unwanted consequence. It would be worthwhile to point out that in a post-covid era, the model faces existential challenges.
This brings us to the question of reimagining social impact(There are multiples dimensions to it). If technology can be one of the answers to the question then what would be the benefits and limitations.
1. Expansion of timings: Like retail in the earlier days, social work is delivered with limitations around time slots. Use of technology can ensure deep-rooted virtual, yet perennial engagement. Not to mention, strong design, nudge engine etc can help ace the awareness, adoption, adherence challenge.
2. Power of choice: Research shows that autonomy is a major driving factor in adoption and adherence of interventions. Autonomy benefits outcomes, it leads to increased accountability, it shifts to needle from being prescriptive to promoting proactivity. Proactive involvement of users in change initiative is hugely desired and remunerative from an impact perspective.
3. Productising social work: Even when the traditional worker is unavailable his/her work lives on creating a window of sustained impact. The information disseminated is standard and there is no loss in transit.
4. Decluttering and releasing service capacity: The social problems address by us today are larger than life. Incremental efforts are limiting in terms of scale. What the impact space really needs today are ways that create exponential impact. Use of technology also creates space for the traditional worker to move up on the knowledge curve and thus contribute to adding higher value.
5. Economies of Scale: Use of technology has a potential to reach the target audience at probably10 times lesser cost .This is not insignificant. With restrictions or limitations around availability of resources (read funds and manpower) , it is important to have agile and lean impact models in place.
The 5 points above are not new. But why haven’t they appealed to every logical mind yet. The fact that penetration of internet and mobile phones is not 100% is understood. The question is have we even designed our interventions to suit the current levels of internet penetration. Can we try to allocate a slice of budget pie to cater to the population which has access to internet? Is there a systematic journey that needs orchestration? Can technology cost allocation be seen as a programmatic cost and not as an overhead? (overheads leads to eyeballs rolling)
It’s high time , the impact space starts allocating strategic technology budget. the design should be directed towards the “to-be” state and not the “as-is”. The approach should be more outward looking than inward. Promotion of direct to consumer technology-led interventions in the social space is the need of the hour. Technology deserves a “Slice of The Budget Pie”.
“You can’t solve a problem on the same level that it was created. You have to rise above to the next level.” Albert Einstein
