I have spoken with many impact organizations with a mission to improve the world and change peoples’ behavior, especially corporate behavior. They have collected crucial data, developed an innovative tool, or have a new framework to approach an unsolved problem. But, they are failing to gain traction and cross an uncharted gap between an initial proof of concept and uptake. If people only knew what they know!
They have a problem that is at once both strategic and technical that I am calling the Last Mile for Impact. Here is my most important advice: You have to meet people where they already are and look like you have always been there. They are bridging a gap between knowledge and action that exists both at a social, human level, and at an incumbent technology layer that shapes the way people organize information and act on it.
The most direct and parsimonious path to impact is to begin with the most collaborative and positive starting assumptions, and to only take an adversarial detour if those assumptions don’t hold up.
First, I consider the social dimension of the task. Here, it is important to begin from a position of non-judgmental empathy and to adapt your communication style to the norms of the stakeholder. Here’s where I usually start: people as a group are smart, and they want to feel good about their work. They hate feeling shamed, feeling stress or uncertainty, and getting in trouble with authority. Organizations respond to financial incentives, risk, or the threat of regulations. Above all, remember that both people and organizations had plans in place before you launched your idea, which creates inertia that your idea will have to overcome. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what could motivate them to your side. Adopting your idea must be seamless and appealing enough that they will set aside their existing plans to jump on board.
So, the first thing you have to consider is “Who is it that needs to be more empowered or make a different choice for me to see the impact I want to have?” This is both an exercise in imagining your target user and discovering their literal job titles. I would ask some of the following questions: Who decides which company to invest in or which supplier to buy from? Who decides what questions to ask? What are the decisionmaker’s concerns about risk? What are their practical constraints? What do they have to do that is tedious, high-friction, or overwhelming? How do they feel about their job emotionally and where does their stress come from?
The next thing to consider is, “What technologies serve that information or organizational purpose today? Which ones need to be built for future requirements? What is not automated that could and should be?” There is almost always an incumbent solution or process, and it sets the expectations your potential users hold about usability and professionalization. You will need to know as much as possible about it in order to appeal to your target users.
Usually with responsible sourcing, the most charitable assumptions to begin with are that smart, mission-driven people are working on this, but they have too much work to do and too little information to reach the decision you want. A clue! You have to make it effortlessly easy to find your information in the course of what they are already doing to meet their responsibilities. You have to show up where they already are. Keeping your crucial data in a separate tool or database that they have to check manually is adding extra work for somebody who is already overwhelmed.
Your task is to find out as much as possible about their process to help you build toward something usable and flexible enough to gain traction. In my experience, you have a few options here: 1) you ask them where they get information, for example by going to conferences or making a survey 2) you read job descriptions for the personas you’re targeting and look at the technology skills they expect people to know or learn or 3) you search for solutions that seem to be targeting those people by offering or organizing the types of information they already know they need.
The next thing to find out is when they look for information where your intervention could make a critical difference, why are they looking? The first plausible motivation is reputation. Companies do not like to be publicly embarrassed, but embarrassment doesn’t cost money if there is no threat of action behind it. Usually the person responsible for avoiding reputational damage works in brand, communications, or marketing. When the cards are down, their opinion is a nice-to-have, but it almost always gives way to more immediate concerns. The next possible reason for seeking information about their operations is that they want to see this system together because they are trying to optimize it. This can be for cost reduction, resiliency, generalized risk, or some other reason (ask them, you have friends in the biz now that you met gabbing about SaaS tools). Those people may not be looking for your data, but they do have a lot of authority to make operational decisions. Finally, the decisionmakers with the most authority are helping companies comply with the law, or they are the law. This is the best place for you to position if you can. Map your information on to any law that might touch on it–should this be reported under CSRD? Would this help a company avoid strict liability under CERCLA? Would this information be useful to regulators or law enforcement? Again, make it easy for them to see the value. Walk them through the connections and business case. Get as familiar as you can with the context, use it to inform your strategy, and speak to it confidently. Reading a regulation and looking up every unclear concept is basically a super power.
Finally, the context also includes a technical layer that you will need to plan for. Given the research you’ve done, you should be thinking about things like “How do people in this domain define a company or other key concepts? What are the critical points where data is needed to facilitate this system, like organizational handoffs, safety regulation, or tax collection? How do people recognize entities across data sets in this domain?” This is not as easy as it may seem; a multinational company may be listed as one entity in a securities exchange, but it is usually composed of dozens of legal incorporations and many locations. Meeting people where they are means modeling your information around the needs and assumptions of the technical systems that are already in use. A record should ideally correspond to the existing systems, and you should support a way of finding records that relate across systems. A system that exists for investors might have a single ticker symbol for a multinational company, for example, so your data should relate to that atomic unit rather than a single domestic legal incorporation. Do not use names for record linkage; this goes for both people and businesses.
At both the social and technical levels, my advice is the same: meet people where they are looking, and do everything you can to fit in. The internet is rife with dead tech tools for impact. Some of them were great ideas, and they simply failed to cross that gap and achieve sustainable adoption. I don’t want to see that happen to you!
In the next part of this series, I will discuss developing or articulating a theory of change and identifying opportunities within it to do strategic innovation.
Feel free to join me in developing these ideas, and comment/contact me here!