This week's theme is "Determining Your Venture’s Social Impact", arguably the most important part of a social venture's business plan. Social ventures only differ from traditional entrepreneurial ventures in that they seek to produce outcomes that are not strictly financial profit, and instead prefer to generate value that can be shared across society. Thus being able to quantify, evaluate and monitor social impact is essential to the success of any social venture.
Moreover, it is important for the leader of a social venture to have a clear vision for the goal of their venture's mission. Having this mental image of what success means for your venture (whether that's eradicating child diseases or providing rural electricity access) will keep your actions aligned with your goals and help the business be more effective and efficient. But quantifying this success can be challenging for social ventures. How can you gauge success when your mission is to reduce racism in society? What does success look like for a venture bent on increasing safety for women on the street at night? Often times extensive soul-searching and creative thinking is required to develop a set of metrics suitable for evaluation of a venture's success.
I say soul-searching as often times in this process, CEO's find that their company's mission may be too broad-based or far-reaching to be able to produce any concentrated effects. In these cases, it's important for the owners and stakeholders to revisit their original motivations and ask, "What is it I really value about this venture? What do I really want to achieve more than anything else?" The answers may reveal a need to scale back on the company goals. For example, a company that starts out wanting to eliminate racism in America may find that effecting change, and proving their concept, may prove impossible on a national scale. A gear down to just a city or one school district, may prove to be a more manageable goal.
I say creative thinking as often times the impacts social ventures seek to have on society are difficult to measure. Thus carefully vetted proxy indicators go a long way to elucidating effectiveness. Using the previous example, how could one measure the level of racism present in a school district? Asking people "Do you feel racist, and if so, how racist do you feel now as compared to before?" is not likely to produce results desired (and may put some employees in harm's way). But tracking and comparing the number of interracial or gang-affiliated fights at schools could reveal a change in behavior and beliefs.
But far too much attention is paid to "final goals"- these ultimate markers of success that show we've finally achieved our ultimate mission. For many social ventures, this day will never come. Racism will always exist to some extent in our country and our world, and so our previous example will be toiling away in perpetuity to reach an unreachable goal. Thus, I have found it more useful, and personally enriching, to formulate smaller "milestone goals" that signify major steps towards a successful outcome. I find this especially helpful with ventures that necessitate some form of societal or behavioral change. Continuing with our racism example, eliminating racism even from just one school district could be a decades long project. Working day-to-day for a 50 year goal can be discouraging. But maybe the venture organizes some milestone goals to break up the challenge. For example, eliminating racism in one teacher, then eliminating racism in one classroom, then eliminating racism from one subject's instructional staff, then eliminating racism from one whole grade level. These piecemeal steps are possible to track in daily efforts and results can be witnessed in real time. These smaller steps also helps focus efforts and resources to ensure maximum efficacy. Using the list of risks and assumptions generated in the last few weeks of activity can be great guides for what milestone goals should reflect (as each risk is in essence one smaller goal to be completed or eliminated).
For my social venture, I have developed similar milestone goals. The overarching mission of the Birdbrain Social Venture is to get the Hummingbird Robotics Kits into Pittsburgh middle/high schools that can not otherwise afford them. This seems like a very straightforward financial goal, but in reality there are a lot of behavioral changes that must occur to support this goal. For starters, the kits can not be used in classrooms unless teachers are prepared to use them. There are a lot of risks to the adoption of this product based around this problem. Teachers are already busy and inundated with educational tools, learning to use another is a chore. Moreover, many older teachers are intimidated by newer technologies and do not feel confident deploying them in their classroom. Any teacher using the kits must have some knowledge of computer programming and electrical circuitry, and thus often this requires some preparatory training. And lastly, there is no reward to the teachers for using the kits, it is only the students who benefit. This I have organized some milestone goals around reducing this risk. 1. Get our tutorial session accredited for "Continuing Education Credits", so American teachers will get some payback for undergoing the preparatory training. 2. Produce effective tutorial materials in foreign languages/illustrations. 3. Produce effective promotional materials that emphasize ease-of-use for teachers and students. 4. Identify young, tech-savvy teacher groups or organizations and target them as early adopters. I found the following website insightful and was very helpful in formulating these goals: https://www.edsurge.com/n/2015-03-24-efficacy-the-true-measure-of-success-in-education.
These four goals provide a solid platform on which to begin the first stages of our venture. They also help target our efforts into a few key actionable activities so we can be sure to not waste what little time and funding we have. And once we accomplish these goals, we will have generated sufficient social impact as to inform our next steps. Thus I would challenge my classmates to consult the list of risks and assumptions they generated in the past weeks and synthesize these concerns into a few milestone goals for their venture. What is your overall mission and what does success look like? What proxy indicators would help you model this success? What are 3 milestone goals you can achieve in the next year or two of operation that you can focus your work around? This should help create a ladder to help your progress towards that ultimate picture of success.
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