Moving the Needle
Small Steps to Effect Big Change
After “rebuild your team,” the second piece of advice presented by GiveBackHack and the Center for Social Enterprise Development at their “Next Steps” event was deceptively simple:
Confirm who your customer is and what s/he wants.
Piece of cake! We spent the entire GiveBackHack weekend validating with attorneys and potential DACA applicants that our idea to lower the barriers to DACA success sounded valuable. We spent hours conducting interviews and polling prospective users of our platform, and the feedback was — acknowledging very legitimate concerns around privacy and security — resoundingly positive.
Given all of that feedback, we can pretty confidently say that DACA applicants, as our customers, want affordable software to help reduce the cost and complexity of DACA applications, right?
Well… not exactly.
You have to consider what these and other immigrants really want. Not being an immigrant myself, forgive me for being a bit presumptuous here, but I speculate that what our customers really want is the ensured continuity of their livelihood. They want not to live under the threat of deportation. They want to prosper in the United States through education and employment and to share rich lives with their friends and family. They want not to be kicked out of their homes.
So, is it fair to say that our customers want software that makes it easier for them to secure those notably higher-order conditions? Maybe, but it’s probably just as fair to say that our customers don’t want to have to use software at all just to keep on living their lives.
Presented that way, while we may not need to completely reevaluate our mission and vision and all of the very tactical things we want to do in the name of social impact, we do need to acknowledge the needle we’re trying to move:
We want to lower the barriers faced by DACA-eligible individuals to achieving their dreams while decreasing the risk of their being removed from their homes.
Holy crap. That’s a pretty big needle.
Iterative Progress Yields Big Results
Bear with me a minute while I tell you a personal story.
About five years ago, I weighed 90 pounds more than I do today. Yes, ninety.
It took me about a year to get to the weight I’ve more or less maintained ever since. My strategy for dropping the weight? Data.
I measured — daily — my calorie intake and expenditure. I focused on the things that I could control in the moment and made what gradual steps I could, because, well, what else could I do?
You see, the number ninety, when we’re talking about changing a person’s weight, is too big. The year it would take to burn the 315,000 calories I would need to burn is too long. I didn’t have any clue how long it would take for me to reach my goal. Without some drastic, harmful action, it was impossible for me to will ninety pounds away in any meaningfully short time frame, but there was one thing that I could imminently control. I could strive for a single goal, every single day, relentlessly: I could consume fewer calories than I spent. Day over day, I could pull the levers associated with this measurement, eating less or exercising more — the “how” didn’t really matter.
And I did so all in the name of a bet.
I don’t mean that a buddy of mine wagered fifty bucks that I couldn’t lose 40% of my body weight in a year, but each day’s measurement was nevertheless a bet. I was placing a bet every day that the things that I could immediately control could affect the thing that I couldn’t. I had no way to look into the future and confirm that my current path would leave me ninety pounds lighter, so I made a long string of not entirely uneducated bets, the results eventually validating that the odds were good that I was on the right track.
Bringing it Back to Big Problems
I won’t suggest for even a second that solving big social problems is as simple as losing weight, but the strategies we employ to solve those big problems are certainly analogous.
- How do you clean up an entire park system? Start by picking up the one piece of trash you see.
- How do you combat thirst, hunger, and slavery around the world? Sell a cup of coffee.
- How do we plan to help hundreds of thousands of people live and enrich their lives unhindered? We’re building an app.
This is a necessarily vast oversimplification of huge, complex issues that a single human mind — and in many cases the collective brain trust of highly effective teams — simply cannot master. If there were a “provide the entire world with access to healthcare” lever somewhere out there, people would be lining up to pull it, but it just doesn’t exist.
What does exist — what matters — is what you can affect, change, and do today and tomorrow; ask yourself, what well-measured bets can you make that will move the world toward an immeasurably better future?
What You Measure Also Matters
During my period of weight loss, I ignored a lot of things I could have measured. I could have looked at my macronutrient intake, my body fat percentage, or even just the amount of beer I was consuming on a weekly basis. Affecting some of those measures may have been good bets; others may just have been noise.
The point is that I tried to identify the one measure that mattered, validated quickly that the measure was meaningful against my long-term goal, and tracked my progress so that I could visualize my results.
I optimized for a very specific long-term outcome leveraging what I could control (a huge caloric deficit spread out over a long time) to achieve a result (the number on the scale) I could not otherwise — without surgery, I guess — affect in a truly direct capacity. There are probably a half dozen other things I could have measured to optimize for some related result (muscle mass, cardiovascular health, improved liver function), but the measure I landed upon was both imminently malleable in terms of my lifestyle and also represented a low barrier to entry, making it the right personal choice at the time.
With DACA Time, we can’t directly control the United States government’s policies on immigration. We can’t force attorneys to charge less to help DACA applicants compile and submit their paperwork. And we don’t have the funding to create scholarship funds to help undocumented youth go to school.
What we can, however, directly control — the one measure that matters for us — is how many people have access to our simplified, affordable solution to compiling DACA applications. There are series of small bets we’ll take along the way to get there (influencing our marketing strategy, engineering roadmap, customer-facing website, etc.), but we can measure ourselves indefinitely against the bar of “how many people have we helped?”
Fortunately, our growth strategy as a social enterprise is very closely tied to moving the social impact needle: simply put, the more DACA applicants we help, the more sustainable our organization becomes. The more sustainable our organization becomes, the more we can devote our team to solving additional, adjacent problems. At that point, we may look at a different measure that matters — make related but slightly different bets against our long-term goal — and see where that takes us toward providing what our customers really want: the means to prosper as residents of the United States.
What examples of small successes contributing to big changes can you share? Do you have questions about how to take small, measured bets toward delivering what your customers want?
Hit us up in the comments here or on Facebook, and let’s start a dialog!
