Recently, I presented at a conference for social change folks and I asked the audience, “How many of you like math?” 1 person (out of about 40) tentatively raised their hand. Inside, I was thinking, “WTF?!? How are we going to save the world if people don’t embrace some social change math??”
I get that lots of you struggled with math in school but perhaps we can flip the script so that math becomes your social change superpower! If that feels too ambitious, perhaps math can at least become a handy social change tool that you don’t mind using every now and again.
Background
Let’s start with why math matters in the social change context. First, math helps us understand the scale of our problems and whether they are getting better or worse. Math can also help us figure out whether our current solutions are actually working and where the holes are. But perhaps most importantly, math can help us validate (or invalidate) game-changing, new solutions to countless social problems, big and small. With this in mind, I offer you 3 important social change concepts that require some math (note: none of this is more complicated than multiplying and dividing):
CONCEPT 1: Increase Scale by Lowering Your Cost Per Successful Outcome
This idea starts with getting clarity on what a successful outcome is for your organization . If you’re working to improve financial resilience, a successful outcome is NOT getting a person to complete your financial resilience program. However, you could define success as the number of people who increase their savings rate after they complete your program. Once you define success, figure out how much it costs to achieve that success per person. Here’s the simple math equation to do that:
Cost Per Successful Outcome = Total cost of running your program ÷ Number of people you successfully impacted
For example, if your program costs $1,000 to run, and your program successfully helps 100 people your cost per successful outcome is $1,000/100 or $10 per person.
Note: in this case, we’re not interested in the number of people you served, but rather the number of people you positively impacted. So if you reached 100 people, but only 50 people achieved the outcome you were aiming, divide your cost by 50, not 100.
Knowing your Cost Per Successful Outcome is important for budgeting, funders, planning, and more. It also informs your efforts to scale up your work. For example, if your organizational goal is to impact 10% of your target population with your solution, here how to figure out how much it would cost if you achieve that scale:
Cost to help 10% of your target population = Cost Per Successful Outcome × People in your target population × 10%
Concept in Action
I worked with a non-profit that offered a GED program that cost more than $10,000 for each person who got a GED (their success outcome). They had more than 100,000 people in their target population which meant that if they wanted to serve 10% of their constituency (10,000 people), they would need to raise more than $100 million! This was far more than they could have hoped to raise and after doing this math, they realized that they needed to focus on innovative ways to drive down their costs considerably (without reducing impact).
When nonprofits are faced with expensive solutions, I’ve seen them repeatedly focus on a few tired old strategies: raise more money, pay staff less, and cut corners everywhere possible. Unfortunately, these strategies hardly ever get us to a point where we are putting a sizable dent in the big problems we’re trying to solve.
In this above case, the organization knew that increasing fundraising and cutting corners would not get them anywhere near where they wanted to be, so they spent time innovating on their solution with a focus on using lower-cost technologies for their program.
We need to create solutions that work at the scale of our problems; a focus on lowering our cost per successful outcome is essential to get there1.
CONCEPT 2: Focus on Improving Value Metrics (Like Conversion and Retention Rates)
If you increase the value of your services (from your constituents’ perspective), you can expect to see increases in things like turnout, engagement, action, and impact. Let’s assume you want people to eat healthier diets… would you educate people about the correlation between vegetable intake and heart health, or would you help folks make vegetable taste so damn good, they actually choose to put down their hamburger? If you chose the latter… Congratulations!! You understand the power of offering value to your constituents!
Two relatively simple ways to determine whether you’re offering value is to look at your conversion rate and your retention rate.
Conversion rate = (The number of people who do a desired action ÷ The number of people you asked to take the action) × 100%
Let’s say you ask 100 people to volunteer for a campaign and 15 people sign up. Your conversion rate for volunteer sign ups is 15%.
Retention rate is a measure of how many people stick with you.
Retention rate = (The number of people still engaged after a certain amount of time ÷ The number of people that you started with) × 100%
If you sign up 15 volunteers and 6 of them are still active 6 weeks later, you have a 6-week volunteer retention rate of 40%.
Generally, if you have high conversion and retention rates, you’re probably offering value. But if you find yourself desperately pleading with people to show up and stick with you, perhaps you should spend less time begging and more time figuring out ways to ramp up your value proposition.
Concept in Action
Like almost all non-profits, AARP is a mission-based organization working hard to make the world a better place. What sets AARP apart is their sharp focus on offering value to their members. Most non-profits ask a lot of their members… donate now, sign this petition, volunteer your time, and donate again. AARP flips this dynamic and gives a lot to their members… award winning publications, dozens of discounts that save members way more than the cost of membership, trusted endorsements of relevant services, and free tax preparation. This relentless pursuit of offering value to members has led AARP to nearly 40 million members, more than $1 billion in discretionary funds annually, and an insane amount of political power which they use to pass all sorts of policies that support older Americans.
When I talk to other non-profit leaders, they often dismiss AARP’s success to the fact that they focus on older people with lots of time and money on their hands. But that’s a misreading of how AARP got to be so big and effective. Lots of groups attempt to recruit people with time and money on their hands but AARP succeeds because of the value they provide to their members. Read the Secret of Scale to learn more about functional organizing which AARP and other groups use to great success. AARP’s membership conversion rate is nearly 50% (a number that’s so high, it’s downright silly) and a membership retention rate that you could never achieve if you simply focus on things like an awesome website, great story-telling, and best-in-class optimization of membership renewal appeals. They succeed because from a value standpoint, AARP’s membership is a no-brainer for millions of people.
Offering value to people is the holy grail in the business world but it is almost non-existent for so many non-profits. That’s a big mistake. You can keep trying to push a heavy cart with square wheels, or… improve the value you offer to constituents and watch your impact, scale, and power get rolling.
CONCEPT 3: Test, Learn, and Improve More Quickly
Is your nonprofit learning and improving quickly enough? Unless you’re a Lean Impact practitioner or engaged in continual improvement inspired by agile development, I’m guessing the answer is a resounding no.
Many non-profits evaluate their programs at the end of 12-month cycles and then maybe make adjustments. In this time of technology, data tracking, and digital communications, year-long learning cycles should be banned. Identifying and testing ways to improve your programs based on feedback from your constituents can and should be done in rapid cycles that take days or weeks, not months or years. Successful companies all around the world have embraced rapid experimentation (many inspired by The Lean Startup); the nonprofit sector would be well-served to do the same.
There are many math concepts needed for program improvement and innovation including randomized A/B testing, short-term impact metrics that predict long-term outcomes, and viral growth rates. However, I’d argue until I’m blue in the face that one of the most important innovation concepts is the speed at which you move through your learning and improving cycles.
Today’s Lean innovators quickly move through a loop in which they build a “minimally viable product” (a proposed improvement to an existing solution or an entirely new idea), test it with real users and measure how they respond, and then learn how to make it better. Then they repeat that build/measure/learn loop until they’ve come up with something groundbreaking. As a general rule of thumb, I’d recommend that you try to move through the Build/Measure/Learn loop at least once per month.
Annual Learning and Improving Rate = The Number of Times You Move Through the Build/Measure/Learn Cycle ÷ 1 Year
Most non-profits I’ve come across engage in this learning and improving cycle once or twice per year. Imagine how much better our work could be if we could move through this cycle 6 times, 12 times, or even more per year.
Concept in Action
I worked with a small group of social innovators focused on building a better, financially self-sustaining way to support millions adult immigrants who want to learn English. Most learners were choosing local English classes but the learning in those classes was slow, the programs were hard to get to, and the classes were expensive.
So we decided to develop an English immersion program that would speed up learning and dramatically reduce the cost to learn English. The traditional, old-school way to develop such a program would be to hire language experts, spend a lot of time creating curriculum and student resources, launch and market the program, then, after students engage in the program for months, we’d evaluate it to see if it actually worked. This “waterfall approach” often leads to flawed solutions and by the time you’ve identified the flaws, you’re plummeting down a waterfall, with almost no way to reverse course. That’s not what we did.
We engaged in a rapid experimentation process where we’d put our early-stage ideas in front of our constituents and quickly learn what worked and what didn’t. We built minimally viable versions of our program, tested them with real students, got feedback, and learned how to improve our offerings. Despite high hopes and sound ideas, the first few versions of our program failed for one reason or another. But we kept testing, listening to our constituents, and making improvements. Over the course of 2 years, we ran more than 30 significant tests and dozens of additional smaller, mini-experiments. In the end, we built a program that has learning impacts which rival in-person classes, does it at a fraction of the cost, is financially self-sustaining, and serves more than 1 million learners annually (and growing).
If our learning cycles occurred once or twice a year, it might take us 15 to 30 years to achieve the kind of success we did, and by that time, our solution would probably be obsolete. Solutions that worked 2 decades ago or even 2 years ago, might not be nearly as effective as they once were. If your organization is not learning and improving in rapid cycles, you’re likely falling far behind.
Conclusion
Lowering our cost per successful outcome, increasing the value we offer to constituents, and speeding up our learning cycles can dramatically improve the impact of our social change endeavors. And even if you still have nightmares about your middle school math teacher, I hope the power of these game-changing concepts inspires you to embrace some of the basic math needed to carry them out well. Let’s do the math to change the world!
Andrew Yang and his supporters wearing MATH hats (Make American Think Harder)
Note to Funders: Many grants don’t provide organizations any funds or flexibility to experiment with ways to lower their cost per successful outcome, increase value to constituents, or speed up learning cycles and iterate based on what was learned. This work takes time and energy and without support from funders, these ideas will gather dust on shelves. If you want better, more scaled-up solutions, don’t focus on finding the perfect idea. Instead, give your trusted organizational partners the space to innovate on theirs.
1 Many who focus on Cost Per Successful Outcome wisely turn to policy/institutional change. Back in the 90s, I worked on a successful campaign to pass a law to strengthen the enforcement of the Clean Water Act in California. That law has helped to improve water quality for tens of millions of people at a Cost Per Successful Outcome of less than $0.25 per person who benefitted.
Steve Nagai-Ma, is a social change innovator dedicated to a more just, equitable, and sustainable society. As the Founding Partner of Flying Bird Consulting, he helps changemakers build the skills needed to effectively innovate and scale up their social impact. Reach him directly at steve@flyingbird.us.