In-Depth Research

After identifying a problem, you should invest time in conducting deep, on-the-ground research both on the problem and on options for solving it. At this stage of the process, there is no substitute for going out into the field to see how potential beneficiaries experience the problem in their daily lives.

That was the approach taken by Kola Masha, the founder of social enterprise Babban Gona, which is based in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. Babban Gona, which means “Great Farm” in Hausa, has a mission to end financial insecurity among smallholder farmers—who are part owners of the enterprise—by enabling them to make more money. It aims to offer youth a path to a viable agricultural livelihood by supporting them through development and training, credit, agricultural inputs, marketing support, and other key services. Masha received a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at MIT and an MBA from Harvard University before moving back to Nigeria in 2007. Around this time, Nigeria had twenty million youth entering a labor force that was already oversaturated. This led to skyrocketing youth unemployment, which, in the eyes of many observers, triggered three major insurgencies (including the infamous Boko Haram) that tore through the country.

Masha believed that the best way to address the problem of conflict was to create more jobs in agriculture, a field that requires large numbers of low-skilled workers. He went to work with Onajite Okoloko, an entrepreneur who had established Notore Chemical Industries, and spent six months traveling through the countryside and demonstrating the efficacy of the company’s fertilizer to smallholder farmers. (Nigerian smallholder farmers used one-tenth as much fertilizer as their peers in other nations, in part because fertilizer products were often adulterated with sand.) Through this work, he gained a much deeper understanding of the problems that farmers faced, and he learned how to earn their trust. Afterward, he became chief of staff to Nigeria’s agricultural minister, helping to develop an agricultural transformation agenda for the country. In 2011, he traveled around the United States and visited agricultural cooperatives on an Eisenhower Fellowship. That experience led him to see that such enterprises can operate at scale only if they have grassroots leadership, professional management, and access to capital.¹²

After accumulating all this knowledge, Masha moved to Saulawa, a farming community in northern Nigeria, and launched Babban Gona. In doing so, he avoided the common pitfall of developing an enterprise in the United States and then trying to transfer it to another country without a deep understanding of the local context, culture, and norms. To better understand the challenges faced by smallholder farmers, he even bought his own small plot of land to cultivate. As Masha demonstrates, success as a social entrepreneur involves a never-ending process of researching the problem one seeks to solve.

Problem Analysis

To design a social venture that will prove effective and sustainable over time, you should analyze your target problem from numerous angles to develop a multidimensional understanding. A number of tools exist to enable a structured approach to analyzing and articulating key aspects of a problem. The impact gaps canvas,¹³ created at Oxford University, is a framework that helps map out a problem as well as current solutions in the field. As shown in figure 10-1, answering specific questions about a problem or “challenge” (what is holding the current status quo in place, what other issues this problem is related to, what the history of the problem is, etc.) and about current solutions (what has already been tried, what has worked and what hasn’t, what future efforts are planned, etc.) produces a comprehensive diagnosis. Insight on “impact gaps” emerges in the space between the challenge map and the solutions map.

FIGURE 10-1

Summary of Daniela Papi-Thornton’s impact gaps canvas

FIGURE 10-2

Development impact and you: causes diagram

The causes diagram offers another approach to breaking down a complex issue. As shown in figure 10-2, this tool encourages the deconstruction of all possible causes of a problem—not just the obvious ones—and it differentiates causes from effects or symptoms. This parsing of information helps highlight solutions that can address not only root causes but also address those causes over the long term.

CAMFED is an international nonprofit that has excelled at analyzing a problem as a means of informing specific solutions. The acumen of CAMFED leaders in this area is illustrated in an impact gaps canvas and a causes diagram that are available on the King Philanthropies website.¹⁴ (CAMFED is part of King Philanthropies’ highly selective portfolio of grantees.) CAMFED’s mission is to multiply educational opportunities for girls and empower young women to become leaders of change. More than four million children in Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have benefited from its innovative approach to educating and empowering girls, and these results stem in part from CAMFED’s comprehensive understanding of the problem it aims to solve.

CAMFED leaders recognized early on that girls in the poorest rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa were not receiving a quality education. Poverty, the out-of-pocket costs of attending school (such as uniforms and school supplies), and gender inequality led families to prioritize sending boys to school over girls. The long distance to schools—particularly secondary schools—in remote areas posed further logistical difficulties and safety risks for girls. When girls dropped out of school early, they became more likely to enter early marriage, to have earlier-than-expected pregnancies, and to raise less-healthy children. These outcomes in turn compounded the pressures that keep girls at home. In addition, because mothers in these communities were largely undereducated, there were few parents who actively encouraged school attendance, few female role models in these communities, and few women in positions of influence.

Landscape Analysis

In addition to analyzing your problem using tools such as the impact gaps canvas and the causes diagram, you should undertake landscape analysis. It is important to identify both the landscape of needs that your intervention will address and the interventions that already exist in that space.

Before starting their organization, CAMFED leaders studied the range of educational programs that governments and civil society organizations were already providing in the field. Government schemes were inconsistent, and while they might cover direct school fees, they failed to overcome other barriers to education. Nonprofits filled some gaps—for example, by providing sanitary products, offering scholarships, and even constructing boarding schools—but these interventions had limited reach and were insufficient to address all the constraints facing young girls. CAMFED leaders found that even when educational solutions were available, they were of poor quality, they generally failed to serve girls in the poorest, hardest-to-reach communities, and they provided little or no transition support for girls who had completed their schooling.

CAMFED leaders’ deep understanding of the landscape for girls’ education in Africa helped them hone a model that targeted gaps they saw within that landscape. Of particular note, they saw that schooling alone would not be enough to improve the lives of girls and young women. They concluded that long-term mentoring and support was also important. This insight spawned the emergence of the CAMFED Association, a powerful network of former CAMFED clients who have gone on to become leaders in their communities. CAMFED Association members include teachers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors, social workers, and local political leaders, and they share an understanding that allows them to speak on behalf of girls and young women who face the same disadvantages that they did. Importantly, many of them live in the same communities where they grew up, and they form a powerful cadre of female mentors and role models for the younger generation. Because CAMFED graduates understand both the challenges facing young women and the benefit of the education and mentoring support that they received, they give back to the program on a truly impressive scale. On average, each CAMFED graduate financially supports more than three girls to attend secondary school, creating a multigenerational multiplier effect that I call “pay-it-forward scaling.”¹⁵ This virtuous cycle reflects a principle that CAMFED places at the center of its work: “When you educate one, you educate many.”

CAMFED has continued to refine its model and expand its reach over multiple decades, achieving substantial economic and social returns at both the individual and societal levels. Its investment in analyzing the problem has reaped dividends that include improvements in school enrollment, retention, and attainment among girls; increased financial assets among young women graduates; and a delay in the age at which women enter marriage and begin motherhood.

Competitive Analysis

An important variation of landscape analysis is competitive analysis. It is essentially an effort to examine “competing” actors in your field to understand what they do, how they do it, and how your intervention will differ from theirs. One excellent means of assessing the competitive position of your planned intervention is to use Sharon Oster’s six-forces model (see figure 10-3),¹⁶ an adaptation of Michael Porter’s five-forces model.¹⁷ Porter’s model was intended to help businesses assess their competitive position, and Oster adapted it to the dynamics of the nonprofit sector. To Porter’s five forces—threat of new entrants, bargaining power of suppliers, threat of substitute products or services, bargaining power of buyers, and rivalry among existing competitors—Oster added a sixth force: funders. She also changed Porter’s “rivalry among” to “relations among” to account for the fact that, while businesses compete with each other, nonprofits often collaborate with other organizations to achieve their missions, and she replaced the term “buyers” with “users.”

FIGURE 10-3

Oster’s six forces

In our book Engine of Impact,¹⁸ Bill Meehan and I demonstrated how Oster’s model works by applying the model to Eastside College Preparatory School, a nonprofit high school in East Palo Alto, California, founded by Chris Bischof and Helen Kim in 1996. Eastside’s mission is to open doors for young people who have been historically underrepresented in higher education. When Bischof and Kim founded Eastside Prep, East Palo Alto had no high school of its own, and its students were bused to several schools in other communities. Eastside Prep therefore had essentially no direct competitors in its market. But it did have to compete for funders, who were critical to the school’s existence and could give their money to any number of other causes. It also had to compete for suppliers—teachers in its case—who could get jobs at other schools, conceivably with better pay. It had to build its reputation among users—students and their families—so it could grow and sustain its enrollment. It would also need to build assets, such as buildings, dorms, and sports facilities, so it could retain its position in the likely event that other competitors entered the market.

As Eastside Prep demonstrates, even an intervention intended to provide essential services to underserved populations must consider the multiple forces that might impact its ability to build a strong position from which to fulfill its mission. Identifying these forces is a critical part of the research process, and this analysis should inform your evaluation of the market context in which you intend to operate.

Target Population Analysis

It is essential to conduct a needs analysis of your target population. In lay terms, this means working to understand the specific needs of the people who stand to benefit from your proposed intervention. First, you must have a very clear idea of who comprises this population, and then you must dig deeply into the unmet needs that you hope to address. Since these needs are likely to change continually—especially if your intervention proves to have an impact—this process must be ongoing.

Proximity Designs, a social enterprise that focuses on Myanmar’s thirty-five million farmers, offers an inspiring example of how to approach this process. Proximity, which was launched by Debbie Aung Din and Jim Taylor in 2004 and has been a grantee of King Philanthropies for many years, designs and delivers affordable tools and services that will help small family farms become profitable. Proximity has served more than one million customers and adds 100,000 new ones annually; farm families that work with the enterprise see an increase in average annual net income of $300, a significant amount in rural Myanmar.¹⁹ To better understand its customers as well as the broader ecosystem of rice cultivation and distribution in Myanmar, the organization interviews thousands of farmers each year, with Aung Din and Taylor personally speaking to hundreds of customers annually.

In 2015, for example, Proximity decided to explore the attitudes, perceptions, and practices regarding paddy farming in Myanmar. There are three million paddy growers in Myanmar, and by building a base of deep knowledge of the country’s paddy-to-rice ecosystem, Proximity aimed to improve its ability to develop products and services that would benefit those farmers. A team of twelve researchers worked over a six-week period to conduct on-the-ground interviews with 120 people using qualitative, empathic research techniques. Interviewees included rice farmers, day laborers, service providers, brokers, traders, millers, and consumers. In-depth contextual interviews lasted from one to two hours; ad hoc interviews with people the researchers met along the way lasted from five to fifty minutes. In addition to talking with participants in the paddy ecosystem, researchers visited shops and warehouses, applied fertilizer, learned how to test the moisture and yield of a paddy, sampled a variety of rice products, and even brewed moonshine! “Research is not just for researchers,” Proximity wrote in From Paddy to Plate, its report on findings from the project. “Talking with and listening to the people for whom you are designing provides the foundational understanding on which great products can be built.”²⁰

As Proximity demonstrates, an aspiring social enterprise must conduct very many interviews before launching an intervention. Before starting the interview process, you should undertake ample preparation; Proximity, for example, took six months to prepare for its interviews with members of the paddy farming ecosystem. It also undertook considerable exploratory research with experts in the field in order to refine the protocol it would use for interviews.

Needs analysis must be an ongoing process. Proximity originally focused its research on rice paddy farmers—in part because rice is by far the most popular crop in Myanmar. But as farmers saw their businesses become more mature, they started asking about sesame (a very high-margin cash crop) and about repurposing Proximity technology to address that opportunity. Yet, before deciding to go into the market (by customizing its tools and services or by creating new ones), Proximity undertook deep-dive research on sesame farming, demonstrating the importance of continually listening, learning, and evolving.²¹

In conducting research on your target population, be sure to follow interviewing best practices. Go into every interview with your questions identified and ranked in importance. Then, before ending each interview, make certain that you have covered your top three questions. (Of course, you should also be open to conversation that diverges from your question list, and it’s fine to engage in genuine topical conversation that may open up new paths of inquiry.) Frame your questions smartly by leaving them open ended, and always avoid leading questions (meaning those that include or imply a desired response). Take good notes and, when the interview is over, codify and synthesize what you learned.

Proximity divided its postinterview process into in-field synthesis, which consisted of informal debriefings with field teams after each research session; daily debriefings to discuss findings, possible process improvements, and goals for the next day; and on-site meetings to create a high-level, synthesized summary of findings for each location. It also employed a data manager to catalog and back up interview content and other data. Of course, not all social ventures will have a research team of this size, but the basic approach is still worthy of emulation.

Systems Change Analysis

Another form of analysis that has steadily gained currency in recent years involves assessing how a problem or proposed solution fits into an overall system. Should you seek to start a social venture, funders are likely to ask how your idea applies a “systems change” lens. Answering that question may not be easy, especially because there are so many different definitions of the term “systems change.” Some use it to underscore the idea of attacking the root causes of a problem and not just its symptoms. Others mean an approach that identifies aspects of the problem that interact with each other. By mapping the parts that form a whole—including all the stakeholders, interdependencies, and mechanisms that make a system operate in a particular way, these social sector leaders aim to create an intervention that will produce lasting change. To be sure, it is important to map and understand a system at the outset. But many social entrepreneurs start by focusing on direct service delivery and then move toward systems change later—after they have achieved success with service delivery and have developed on-the-ground experience to inform their worldview.

Evan Marwell is one social entrepreneur who chose to target the system he aimed to change rather than focus only on a narrow opportunity or technical challenge.²² His goal was a big one—to bring broadband internet access to every public school classroom in the United States—and he realized that to succeed he would have to change the entire system that constrained internet access. He understood that he needed to engage governors and state governments, early and often, and he did it. Indeed, at the outset, he developed an “influencer map” that helped him identify all parties that he would need to engage both in the private sector and in government, and at both federal and local levels. By 2020, Marwell’s organization, Education Super Highway, had helped more than forty million students gain access to high-speed internet.

“Every societal problem is embedded in a system,” Sally Osberg, the first president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, told students when she appeared as a guest in my practicum class, adding, “Any system is infinitely complex and connected to other systems. Part of the challenge is to scope your problem and define the equilibrium [or] status quo that has led to the injustice that you are studying.” In Getting beyond Better, the seminal book that Osberg wrote with Roger Martin, she and Martin emphasize the importance of understanding the equilibrium in a system in a really deep way before attempting to change it. “The most successful change agents must truly understand how and why an equilibrium works, while remaining steadfast in their mission to shift it,” Martin and Osberg write.²³ This means charting the actors, their roles, and the interactions between actors that reinforce the equilibrium.

Ideation

One way to generate ideas for potential solutions is by employing tools from design thinking (see also Stuart Coulson’s chapter 11 in this volume). Consider, for example, creating an “affinity diagram”—a tool that gathers large amounts of language data (ideas, opinions, issues) and organizes it analytically into groups based on their natural relationships.²⁴ You could also create a “beneficiary journey map”—a simple framework that helps you think through key moments for your customer or beneficiary as they experience your solution.²⁵ A well-fleshed-out journey map will reveal needs, gaps, and pain points, helping you identify and improve key features of the product, experience, or service you’re designing.

As you develop ideas for your intervention, ask yourself how you would evaluate the success of each one. At this stage, you will still have a number of ideas, and you will begin to narrow them down to those that seem most promising—a process called convergence. But even as you go through that process, do not let yourself get fixated on just one idea; indeed, to do so is another potential pitfall. Instead, continue to explore a wide range of ideas and look beyond the obvious. Many ideas will not pan out, and that’s absolutely fine. It’s also important to note that ideation—like research—continues even after a social innovation is up and running, because there are always ways to make an intervention better.

One organization that excels at generating and honing new approaches to social innovation is Pratham, a nonprofit founded in Mumbai in 1995. It provides educational solutions for children throughout India. Propelled by its mission, “Every Child in School and Learning Well,” it has grown into one of the country’s largest NGOs. It develops programs on the basis of innovation and rigorous evaluation, often working in tandem with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) to design and execute randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and to build a body of evidence for the impact of Pratham’s work.

Through Read India, its flagship program, Pratham offers short, intensive periods of remedial education in reading and math to children in grades three through five who are behind in basic skills. Underlying the program is a Pratham-developed pedagogical approach called Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL), in which children are grouped by ability rather than age or grade. Its proven results, as measured by J-PAL, show that it “consistently improves learning outcomes when implemented well and has led to some of the largest learning gains among rigorously evaluated education programs.”²⁶

Even as Pratham took pride in these results, it also continued to experiment. A key area of innovation focused on expanding its work to include mothers and young children in settings within and outside formal school environments. In the hope that intervening with children at a younger age would reduce the need for remedial intervention in primary school, Pratham created Early Years, a program that aims to improve learning among children in preschools and in grades one and two. Significantly, this program—if it proved to be effective—would disrupt Pratham’s own Read India model.

I had worked with the talented leaders of Pratham and J-PAL over many years, and in 2018, my colleague Cindy Chen and I approached Pratham to discuss its early childhood education program and opportunities to scale that work. Considerably more evidence was needed to determine the efficacy of Early Years, but with testing and time, it was possible that this new model could scale across India and beyond and thereby impact millions of children worldwide. To implement the Early Years approach, Pratham proposed a program called Hamara Gaon (“Our Village”), a model that would target learning interventions for young children while strengthening community ownership. By working in each village over a period of three years, the main objective of Hamara Gaon was to ensure that preschool and early primary school children would secure foundational learning skills that would be sustained over time, leveraging the power of community involvement, especially with mothers. A robust set of measurement tools, including “village report cards” and periodic assessments of both preschool and elementary school children, would be in place to monitor results and assess a comprehensive set of research questions.

Pratham also worked closely with J-PAL to plan for an RCT that would evaluate the impact of Early Years on basic reading and math skills. If results prove to be positive, Pratham aims to partner with state governments to scale the program through deployment in public schools. King Philanthropies initiated and made a grant to implement Hamara Gaon in eight hundred villages across the states of Gujarat, Odisha, and Rajasthan, and work on the ground began in December 2018. Early results are promising.

Theory-of-Change Development

Once you have explored a range of ideas for addressing your problem and narrowed them down to the best ones, it is time to design one or more compelling interventions based on evidence of what works and what kind of impact will be achieved. This will require that you have a theory of change that explains how the desired impact will come about. (At this stage, you might want to design multiple intervention hypotheses—each with its own theory of change—to prevent you from locking down a solution too early.)

A theory of change is a logical description of how the particular strategies you intend to use will solve the problem you aim to address. The Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford GSB has a helpful online guide to developing a theory of change (authored by Paul Brest, Laura Hattendorf, and Bernadette Clavier²⁷), and in this volume Gloria Lee’s chapter 8 addresses this topic as well. The process of articulating a theory of change is not just for startups; on the contrary, every established social sector organization needs a theory of change to explain how its strategies will help achieve its mission. A theory of change should ideally be based on a detailed, comprehensive, and rigorous explanation of the empirical evidence that makes you believe your intervention will work. It should be tested rather than intuited. As Paul Brest and Hal Harvey note in their book Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy, “A theory of change is only as good as its empirical validity. An intuitively plausible theory of change is better than none at all—but the not-for-profit sector is littered with programs based on theories of change that seemed intuitively plausible but were not valid. Therefore, the more tested the theory of change, the sounder its use as the basis for strategy.”²⁸

As you design your potential interventions and craft the theories of change that underlie them, it is important to consider the value proposition that your intervention offers to its target customers. Eastside Prep, for example, offers its students multifaceted support to ensure that they will have a very high probability of being admitted to a four-year college. Today, twenty-five years after the school’s founding, more than 99 percent of its graduates have been accepted to four-year colleges or universities and, importantly, 80 percent have earned a bachelor’s degree or are on track to do so. Even more remarkably, 99 percent of Eastside Prep students are in the first generation of their family to attend college. By comparison, nationwide in the United States, 11 percent of first-generation low-income students have earned a bachelor’s degree.

According to the Social Security Administration, American men with bachelor’s degrees earn approximately $900,000 more in median lifetime earnings than their counterparts who have only a high school diploma; among American women, the difference in median lifetime earnings comes to $630,000. So, the value proposition of Eastside Prep is strong.²⁹ Eastside Prep also supports its alumni (including those in college and those who have graduated from college) by connecting them to each other. One criticism of other programs that promote college attendance is that their participants get into college but then drop out and are left with significant debt. Eastside Prep works to ensure that its students obtain a college degree.

Choice of Organizational Structure

Once you have designed a compelling intervention, you can follow any of several possible pathways to impact, as shown in figure 10-4.

You will need to decide whether your innovation can be adopted by an existing organization or whether a new social venture must be established. There are significant advantages to leveraging the distribution footprint and economies of scale of an existing organization. However, as Kevin Starr, managing director of the Mulago Foundation, underscored in a Stanford Social Innovation Review article coauthored with Sarah Miers, most large NGOs are reluctant to adopt the new innovations of social entrepreneurs.³²

For those who decide to disseminate their innovation by launching a new social venture, a new journey is just beginning. Engine of Impact provides actionable guidance for the many decisions that you will have to make in building your organization, particularly with respect to elements such as mission, strategy, impact evaluation, funding, managing talent, and board governance. In chapter 2 of this volume, I provide advice for leaders wielding these elements to build their organizations. In chapter 7 of this volume, Steve Davis provides astute and relevant insights as well.

FIGURE 10-4

Social innovation: pathways to impact

If you decide to create a new social venture, one of the most important—and often one of the most difficult—early decisions that you make will involve structure: Should your organization be a for-profit company, a nonprofit organization, or a hybrid? I encourage students to spend considerable time and energy making this decision because taking a wrong turn at the outset can be very difficult to reverse and brings real challenges. The Center for Social Innovation at GSB has assembled useful resources—including insights from professor Sarah Soule and legal expert Todd Johnson—for those wrestling with decisions about legal structure.³³ Kevin Starr and Laura Hattendorf’s article “The Doer and the Payer: A Simple Approach to Scale” provides especially helpful guidance.³⁴

In recent years, we have seen a trend in which an increasing number of our practicum students opt to structure their social ventures as for-profit enterprises. Take heed, we warn them, and make sure that the unit economics justify this decision.³⁵ Look closely at your revenue model: As you produce each additional unit of whatever your product or service may be (in this context, it will likely take the form of delivering your intervention to additional beneficiaries), will you make more money or will you lose more money? If the latter, you need to consider structuring your organization as a nonprofit. You must also ask yourself if the anticipated profits of a for-profit enterprise will be sufficiently compelling that external investors will be motivated to invest? If external investors do come on board, will you be comfortable with the time line and financial targets that they expect? If the expectations of external investors will lead you to change the target segment or problem that you are addressing in a way that generates less overall social impact, then you must carefully weigh the trade-offs.

Be prepared for the possibility that your idea will prove not to be compelling for one reason or another. In that case, it is easy to fall into the pitfall of stubborn reluctance to pull the plug, not least because you have invested considerable time and energy in your venture. Please view that time and energy as “sunk costs” and view your learning as a significant “return” that you will get to keep and that no one can take away from you! There are always opportunities to join another organization and contribute your talents, knowledge, and skills as you continue to hone your model and potentially restart the innovation process.