Fifth Anniversary Retrospective
How much impact can you have in five years?
I started GRID in February of 2014, in response to a growing desire from independent researchers and designers, to find new ways of working in the social impact space. They wanted to take on large-scale projects that made a difference, they said, and to collaborate with experts with different skills. They wanted to maintain their independence, but also work on teams with mission-driven clients.
GRID Impact was an experiment in organizational design: a prototype of a new way for people to work together, that’s continued to evolve in the five years since. It was also an experiment in methodology, integrating the insights and rigor of behavioral science with the methods of human-centered design — the first organization to do so, as far as we know.
After five years of iterating and refining this methodology, we can say with certainty that it is possible to execute creative work with scientific rigor, and conduct research and experimentation with creative elements.
Digging through our archives, it’s been astounding to see what this model has made possible: 49 unique projects in 22 different countries so far, with some of the most effective foundations, NGOs and organizations on the planet.
What follows are five examples of how this new model has helped realize positive impacts on millions of lives. We’re honored and humbled to have made it this far, and excited to see what the next five years will bring.
~ Alexandra Fiorillo, Founder and CEO
2014: Rethinking Financial Education for Microentrepreneurs in Ecuador
Financial education doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to making microentrepreneurs more successful; we set out to change that. Through extensive interviews and rigorous analysis, we were able to pinpoint financial and management practices that actually worked. Using a Human Centered Design approach, we made these practices the foundation of a “rule of thumb” financial heuristics training program,that real world entrepreneurs could understand and ultimately adopt, with far greater success than previous educational programs.
Developed in collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank and Banco Pichincha.
The RCT found that the heuristic training has statistically significant and economically meaningful impacts, one year after the training, on indexes of sales and profits relative to the control, with increases of 7.3 percent in sales and 8.2 percent in profits with respect to the control group. These positive effects appear to be driven by the adoption of best practices taught during the training, including better inventory control and management.
~Alexandra Fiorillo, Project Lead
2016: Designing a User Experience Toolkit for Mobile Money Apps in Pakistan
Mobile money is being adopted in phenomenal numbers right now, and can have profound positive effects for users who’ve traditionally been underserved by banks, like women or low-income customers. This project, developed in collaboration with Karandaaz Pakistan, had us prototyping and iterating UX and UI designs with real users in the field, to figure out what actually works, and codify it in a toolkit that anyone can use.
Supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Department for International Development (DFID).
This was a new way of collaborating and working in Pakistan and the financial inclusion sector more broadly / globally. We’re proud to have contributed new thinking in this space. And the fact that digital financial services providers across Africa have been downloading the toolkit and using it in their design process is a testament to the importance of the work.
~ Adam Little, Lead Designer
2017: Delaying First Pregnancy for Girls in Niger and Bangladesh
When recently married girls can wait just a few years before having their first child, everybody wins: healthier kids, more opportunities for the mother, and better economic development for the community. But it’s an issue that’s deeply wrapped up in social and cultural norms, so addressing it was a slow, careful, and very collaborative process. It also brought some unique challenges in terms of setting up a remote studio without a lot of resources (which you can read more about here).
Developed in collaboration with CARE USA, CARE Bangladesh, and CARE Niger, and supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
We are proud that we contributed to the learning agenda of what might work to delay pregnancy of recently married adolescent girls. We don’t yet know if what we designed works — implementation is beginning this year and will run through 2020 — but we are confident that the interventions we designed speak to the unique needs, desires, contexts and behaviors of the girls and families and communities we designed with.
~ Raïsa Mirza, Design Researcher
2017: Connecting Bay Area Residents to Legal Aid Services
Legal services are the most under-funded social service in the United States, which often makes legal issues an insurmountable obstacle to climbing out of poverty. Project Legal Link is a non-profit that helps people in Northern California’s Bay Area find legal services they can afford, and GRID Impact worked with them to create new training modules and web tools for social service caseworkers. The end result: better referrals, more confident caseworkers, and clients who get the legal help they need.
Developed in collaboration with Project Legal Link and T Lab, and supported by the Tipping Point Community.
We were most proud of hearing the social workers talk about how much less anxiety they felt having access to Link, the online referral tool we created. They carry such an emotional burden as social workers and it felt great knowing that we had contributed in a small way to ways to ease that mental burden for them — that it was possible to make a dent in the overall messed-up system.
~ Elizabeth Long, Behavioral Designer
2018: Increasing Adoption of Kangaroo Mother Care in Ethiopia and India
Over 96% of the low-birthweight babies born each year are in developing countries, and Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) is a proven way to keep them thriving in their fragile early weeks. Working together with Catapult Design, GRID Impact used behavioral science and Human-Centered Design practices to make the practice more common. A combination of communication materials, training programs, and physical space redesigns helped nudge behaviors, with the goal of increasing the practice of KMC, and ultimately lowering infant mortality rates.
Supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
During the initial qual phase, one of the partners was amazed at the information they got using Human Centered Design tools like card sorting. They said they were shocked at how much work the community health workers did and how difficult their jobs were. And that made them see [the health workers] in a whole new light instead of seeing them as people who just weren’t doing their job well.
~ Elizabeth Long, Behavioral Designer
We hope you’ve enjoyed this retrospective. Please reach out to us if you have any questions about this work or collaborating with us. What are some of your highlights from the last 5 years?
