What social impact experiments can you conduct to improve your interventions?

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If you are working on a social impact project, you probably want to know if your interventions are effective, sustainable, and scalable. But how can you measure and improve your impact without spending too much time, money, and resources? One way is to conduct social impact experiments, which are small-scale tests of your assumptions, hypotheses, and strategies. In this article, you will learn what social impact experiments are, why they are useful, and how to design and run them.

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Stephanie Wilson

Driving Revenue Growth through Social Impact and Partnerships

1 What are social impact experiments?

Social impact experiments are methods of learning from data and feedback to inform your decisions and actions. They are similar to scientific experiments, but they focus on solving real-world problems and creating positive change. Social impact experiments can help you answer questions like: What problem are you trying to solve? Who are your beneficiaries and stakeholders? What are your expected outcomes and indicators? What are the best ways to deliver your interventions? How can you scale up your impact?

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2 Why conduct social impact experiments?

Social impact experiments can offer several advantages, such as validating or invalidating assumptions and hypotheses related to your problem, solution, and impact. It can also help you improve your interventions based on evidence and feedback, while reducing the risk of failure and waste by testing ideas before implementing them at a large scale. Furthermore, it can increase accountability and transparency by displaying results and learnings to funders, partners, and beneficiaries. Finally, it can build capacity and culture of learning and innovation.

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Stephanie Wilson

Driving Revenue Growth through Social Impact and Partnerships
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Social impact experiments can serve as the crucible where ideas are refined and theories are put to the test, allowing you to fine-tune initiatives for maximum impact. From my experience, I've found that at minimum these two experiments are invaluable: Stakeholder Engagement: The iterative nature of experiments allows for frequent check-ins with stakeholders. This opens up avenues for deeper involvement from community members, beneficiaries, or even funders who appreciate being part of a dynamic, learning process. Scalability: Social impact experiments provide the preliminary data that is essential for scaling a project. They offer a snapshot of the potential challenges and successes a larger initiative might face.

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3 How to design social impact experiments?

Designing effective social impact experiments requires several steps. Start by defining your goal and research question. Then, choose your experiment type and design, as well as select your sample and data sources. Lastly, plan your implementation and analysis. This includes delivering the intervention, collecting data, ensuring quality and ethics, analyzing the data, and interpreting the results. All of these steps are necessary for successful social impact experimentation.

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Stephanie Wilson

Driving Revenue Growth through Social Impact and Partnerships
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One must not overlook the role of community input during the design phase. Ethical considerations should also take center stage, ensuring that experiments do no harm and genuinely contribute to the welfare of the community. It’s not just about data; it’s about people. Their voices and experiences should inform each step of the experiment design.

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4 How to run social impact experiments?

To run successful social impact experiments, it's important to start small and simple. Focus on one or a few key variables and outcomes and use existing data and tools if possible. Be ready to iterate and adapt your experiment based on feedback and learnings. Open communication and collaboration with beneficiaries, stakeholders, other researchers, and practitioners is essential. Don't forget to document and disseminate your experiment process and outcomes. Write a report or a case study that summarizes your experiment, then share your insights and recommendations with your audience and community.

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5 Examples of social impact experiments

To inspire you, here are some examples of social impact experiments conducted by different organizations and sectors. Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) uses randomized evaluations to test and improve the effectiveness of poverty reduction programs. Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) creates and evaluates solutions to social and development problems. The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) applies behavioural science to generate insights and solutions for public policy. Acumen invests in social enterprises that serve the poor and marginalized, using lean data to measure social impact. Nesta is an innovation foundation that supports and runs experiments to tackle social challenges.

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6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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Jayant Sharma

United Nations Officer ● Scaling Innovation and Emerging Technologies for Societal Benefit ● Global Leader for Early-Stage Ventures ● Once a Co-Founder ● LinkedIn Top Voice
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A more long-term issue to be mindful of with interpreting the results of social impact experiments is that the study design is based on a clearly defined hypothesis. Yet, some of the 2nd and 3rd order effects of interventions are realized in the later stages of implementation/adoption of the intervention and they often arent part of the hypothesis of the experiment. So, the intervention may lead to more externalities (positive or negative) than those captured/measured by the experiment designed at a specific point in time of the lifecycle of an intervention.

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Stephanie Wilson

Driving Revenue Growth through Social Impact and Partnerships
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I'd like to bring up the importance of fostering a culture of continuous learning and adaptability within your organization when engaging in social impact experiments. It's essential to celebrate successes, but equally critical to understand that not all experiments will yield positive results. However, even those that don’t meet expectations are an opportunity for learning and iteration. In my experience, one of the most insightful ways to learn from both successful and less-than-successful experiments is through a structured debriefing process. This involves not only data analysis but also team discussions and reflections on what worked, what didn't, and why.

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What social impact experiments can you conduct to improve your interventions?

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1 What are social impact experiments?

2 Why conduct social impact experiments?

3 How to design social impact experiments?

4 How to run social impact experiments?

5 Examples of social impact experiments

6 Here’s what else to consider

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