Our group has been chatting about measuring our social
impact. It’s easy to dream big with our
BHAG and see what a world looks like that changes the conversation about race,
the difficulty I am anticipating is how to measure the impact according to
Geoff Mulgan’s model.
“But for other social issues, the links between supply and
demand are missing. In some cases,
effective demand may be lacking because funders, politicians, or private
citizens do not view a need as pressing enough to warrant their resources. For example, some states are unwilling to
fund sex education or drug treatment.”
Face Race registered as an obvious need to fill the market,
but since joining the team my own market research seems to be telling a
different story. A lot of casual
conversations with others have resulted in a “isn’t that topic over” or “been there done that” type of attitude. As someone who worked in schools, I have seen
the consequences of these attitudes and ignored conversations because no one
wants to address the uncomfortableness of the issues. Whether or not people want to talk about it,
or address institutional racism, it is still very much present in our schools
and other public and private institutions.
We might have difficultly coming up with metrics for how to
measure the impact but we can certainly see the impact of not addressing these
issues in our schools, justice system, etc.
After getting involved in this venture and keeping it in the forefront
of my mind, I have had almost a daily experience validating the need to address
this issue. But, I think we are going to
run into a lot of people who will not see the need for the demand, but the
supply is obvious. I know this is a
venture and needs to be sustainable, but I keep envisioning the transition
looking like a public campaign that uses the controversial topic as the main
marketing strategy to start and change conversations. ..
The question then becomes, not how to we measure the impact? but how do we convince stakeholders that there is a demand?
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