There is a playbook to build startups, say a B2B SAAS startup, a B2C tech company or a D2C brand, but there is none to build a non-profit unicorn, an organization that positively impacts lives of at least a million people. As the non-profit ecosystem matures, such a framework is necessary to help ambitious non-profit entrepreneurs to design interventions that lead to systemic change at scale.
At Change Engine, our goal is to bring out an evidence-led playbook for building non-profits, but here is the good news. We already have a W.I.P. playbook and it is EPIC! Pun-intended, let me lay it out for you.
E
Evidence for problem, owning the conversation
The first part is understanding the problem. We find entrepreneurs generally understand their problems well qualitatively, having experienced it up close themselves or through deep connections with the community. This is very important and much needed, and an integral part of intervention design as we will discuss later.
However, having a quantitative idea of the problem is as important, if not more. Simply stated, can you talk about your problem in numbers – x% youth are deprived of higher education due to inability to pay, y% lesser women than men in jobs, z% youth do not have job skills. Simple as it may sound, it is not always straightforward: public data may not be readily available, one may need to collect it through large-scale surveys or piece it from various sources. Also, the data should be sharply focussed on your problem/target group, you need benchmarks to compare (say employment in India vs. developed nations), and there should be enough detail to get a holistic understanding of the problem (say group comparisons, e.g., inability to pay for higher ed by state, degree, gender, etc.)
Such an understanding is called ‘State of the Sector’ and you find several such reports on different topics – both good ones and bad ones. They tell us what is the situation today, and why it is not good. You may bring a second set of evidence around why the state is the way it is – getting some insight into the causes. For example, if MSMEs aren’t growing fast enough, is it due to some facet of ease of doing business; if youth do not have job skills, is it because of outdated curriculum, low quality of teachers, quality of graduates at input or a combination of these. While ascribing causality is hard and second order, getting together macroeconomic and survey-based indicators are helpful to paint a picture. Non-profit must continue to sharpen evidence in its journey towards systemic change. Good examples include ASER Report of Pratham, National Employability Reports of Aspiring Minds and Ease of Doing Science study by FAST, India.
These reports serve two purposes. First,they help set a quantitative goal for your organization – what must the numbers be for you to have achieved or substantially progressed in your mission. These numbers can be directly on the state of problem (say, percent women in jobs) and/or leading measures (percent women educated/aware of jobs, etc.). We call these Northstar Metrics and Leading Indicators. These are super important, since they give a measure of success. It guides your intervention design – will the intervention ultimately make a substantial difference. It also gives you a benchmark to consistently measure against.
The second purpose is that publishing these reports establishes you as a credible player in the ecosystem, who has deep understanding of the problem. It also illuminates the problem for others in the ecosystem, establish its importance and rally support for it. People believe numbers and that’s why producing such numbers is the sure way to create surround sound around the issue. By regularly publishing these reports and showing change/or no change, helps you own the problem and be its custodian.
P
Public Goods
Most problems of interest are large and complex enough for one organization to tackle. Even if you find a great intervention, you may need more folks to replicate the intervention or act around the intervention, in the value chain, forming an ecosystem to deliver the full impact. This means you need to find ways to multiply yourself!
This basically takes two avatars. First, open source your data and approach. When you publish a report, you can give out the data for more folks to analyse, join other data sources and get deeper insights. That will get the ecosystem interested in your problem – at Aspiring Minds, we shared AMCAT data with labour economists and public policy folks to get various insights in job skills, labour markets and higher education. You may also consider open sourcing your approach , for more folks to be able to replicate. For example, if you have figured out a mechanism to scale a government scheme among citizens, you may open-source the mechanism for others to replicate and scale. Or if you have figured out a job skill curriculum and methodology for rural areas, but open source it for others to replicate and even train the trainers!
The second way is to publish ‘how-to’ guides to supplement your intervention. Let us assume you worked with the government on a policy that allows universities to have 1 year internship/apprenticeship instead of course work. Now, you need to drive adoption. You need to design how-to guides for universities to implement such programs, build case studies with a few universities and distribute them widely. That will help your intervention reach maximum impact.
There are various ways of putting out public goods. The bottom line is to help others ‘act’ towards solving your problem of interest and energising the whole ecosystem, to fill the gaps, to solve the problem at large.
IC
Intervention for change
This is the core of your work – something your organization spends 60-70% of its time. And this one is the trickiest. Here you implement something to solve a problem of mammoth scale with the limited capacity, any single non-governmental organization can command. What is the narrow intervention, that when combined with the power of narrative and public goods, can in due course help move the needle on your northstar metric.
We call these high-leverage interventions – narrow intervention to some part of the value chain, which can help solve the problem, without doing deep interventions in other parts. Thankfully, there are some templates to unlock the power of Samaaj, Sarkar and/or Bazaar. Here is a quick non-exhaustive list:
- Policy Intervention: Can you fix a current policy or design a new policy that can become an enabler of social change for your problem. For example, the policy to have reservation for EWS students led to many under-served children reach schools, or so did the Right to Education (+ the work of Central Square Foundation on foundational learning). In case of job creation, policies fixing land/labour laws can make MSMEs thrive and create jobs. Policy work is generally slow, and takes time to fructify, but has huge pervasive impact on the ecosystem. This is where you work right up close with Sarkar and unlock their power of huge impact by changing the written word.
- Strategic Program Design for the government: Many a times, the right policies are already there, but government needs strategic support for good program design and enablement. For example, proper digitization and last mile support, do wonders to government policy implementation and management. The PLI policy is already there, but helping government set the PLIs to be industry-friendly and high ROI, can do wonders. This work also has huge impact, is faster than policy work, but has the risk of being non-strategic. Examples here include Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, India work in Haryana school education, Sattva Consulting and Samagra | Transforming Governance work in apprenticeship programs, Centre for Effective Governance of Indian States (CEGIS) work in effective governance.
- Augmenting government implementation capacity: Here, the government policy and program is already there, but the government capacity is inadequate. The puzzle is how to augment government capacity in a way that the marginal cost of scaling is low. Non-profit entrepreneurs do this using donor money, volunteer networks or community mechanisms to help implement a government program effectively. This intervention lies right at the center of Samaaj, Sarkar and Bazaar, leveraging the power of all these three actors. There are various examples including Indus Action, Haqdarshak and The Akshaya Patra Foundation for this.
- Public Advocacy and awareness: Here, the mission is to get the community itself own the problem and catalyze a response. This would include campaigns around sexual health, domestic violence, early marriage, and so on. You will use the power of media, communities or even the government, to amplify your message. While awareness is the beginning, you will catalyze the target audience to self-organize into self-help groups, communities, and scale solutions. Good examples include ‘Ghanti Bajaao’ campaign, ‘Alcohol Anonymous’, Rural Women Self-Help Groups and others.
- Finding market-ready solutions: For certain problems, you can find a solution which the market is ready to pay for, and can scale through your organization and replicas of yours. These are called 'Social enterprises'. Examples include microfinance, low-cost cataract surgery, new vaccine development, good job-oriented training programs, solar-based electricity for rural areas (in a different era) and more. The beauty here is that scale is inherent in the approach itself. The risks include oversimplifying the problem or not reaching the poorest of poor.
There are more, but we will stop here for now and expand further in more writings.
As you will see, as we move from the earlier to the latter, from data to intervention, we go from the big picture to minute interventions. Both are important and symbiotic. The big picture is necessary to have a sense of the goal, and what would an actual change mean. The interventions helps you put your ear to the ground, understand the details of the problem and actually act. The big picture informs intervention design and the intervention implementation must help you understand and reason the big picture better.
The big picture alone makes you an ‘excel monkey’ and the interventions alone will make you incremental.
The recipe is zooming in to the detail and zooming out to the big picture, over and over again, as you build your non-profit unicorn. Start today!
Authored with Shubham Bansal
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