Adventures in Lean Impact – Lean for Social Good

Lean Impact is defined as the use of the Lean StartUp model for social good and emphasizes maximizing input on what is most valuable to the user of the product or program while minimizing wasted effort by focusing on the identification of potential solutions and then testing them with “minimum viable products” (source). The thinking is that you get feedback on an approach before investing large amounts of time and resources. We like the idea and wanted to learn more about how it can be applied to our work.

The Lean Impact model has given us a lot of insight into new ways to think of our own work of creating “how to” resources for change makers–those working in nonprofits and social change efforts–to provide guidance to eliminate some of the challenges faced daily in communicating the importance and impact of your work and accelerate its success. Part of the process has been the important task of identifying the metric that matters–in other words, using data to make decisions. If you are interested specifically in learning more about the use of “the one metric that matters” Beth Kanter has a great post that discusses their use in nonprofit organizations.

Anther vital step is the formulation of hypotheses and their immediate testing. Our team created hypotheses about what we understood top challenges to be and then “got out of the building” to test them. We spoke with ten individuals that worked in nonprofits and realized that speaking broadly about “communications strategy” was not hitting the mark. People were interested in how to apply strategy in the specific tasks they were tackling day-to-day. So, we went back to our plans and made adjustments.

This has been such a helpful process to focus thinking on the ultimate aims of a project and allowing for an evolution of thinking throughout. We will keep you posted as our process continues!

You can check out the first two how to’s we have created at:

How to create a core message and How to identify your audiences