Você quer melhorar sua estratégia de impacto social. Como você pode usar o design thinking para fazer isso?

Community involvement can, and should, extend beyond extracting information when developing your social impact strategy. You can incorporate a variety of participatory approaches to make sure the engagement is beneficial for you and your community members. For example: Create a community advisory board where you compensate members for: - helping you define your program goals and KPIs - analyzing results of program evaluation projects - contributing to conversations around resource and budget allocation. This approach will ensure that your strategy is designed around the perspectives and priorities of your community.

Center humans, intersectional and marginalized humans, in the design process. If you can, take this as far as you can with either ethnographic research (deep interviews in their home so they can describe all elements of their experience) or better, learn how/when/why humans interact with your product service, and design it for them. Companies are often surprised to learn so much about what it's like to use something as simple as a diaper and what else is contributing to its effectiveness, ease of use, and sustainable impact.

By fostering human-to-human connections, you can ensure that your initiatives are not only beneficial but also genuinely impactful. Embedding emotional intelligence into your brand’s DNA from the outset is crucial. This approach helps in building trust and fostering long-term relationships with the community. For a brand, demonstrating empathy, actively listening, and responding to the needs and concerns of the community with sensitivity and care. Moreover, a strong social impact strategy is iterative. By continually refining your approach and staying attuned to the evolving needs of the people you serve, you can ensure that your efforts remain relevant and impactful.

In my experience, incorporating these strategies into your approach, you can use design thinking to enhance your social impact- Prototype Solutions-In the prototyping phase, create tangible representations of your ideas. This allows you to test and refine your ideas before implementing them on a larger scale. Test and Refine-Gather feedback from stakeholder and use it to refine your solutions. This iterative process ensures that your solutions are effective and meet the needs of the community. Collaborate with Others-Design thinking encourages collaboration. Work with other organizations, government agencies, or businesses to create more impactful solutions. Collaboration can lead to more resources, more ideas, and a greater reach.

Prototyping is vital in the Accelerate Impact Model. I create simple, cost-effective models to test and refine ideas swiftly. This method allows us to identify viable concepts early, saving time and resources. By rapidly prototyping, we gather crucial feedback that informs our strategies, ensuring that we invest in solutions with the most social impact potential before full-scale implementation.

Testing and learning help in identifying successful areas and areas that need to be halted for wider impact. This means in working on an impact project, you need to gather feedback. For example, whilst I was designing the structure of the Sara Foundation Africa's Career Advancement Program (CAP), through gathering feedback and testing the model, I was able to identify that a stage-by-stage structure of 20% learning and 80% practice would give a better outcome than traditional 100% tech learning programs. This feedback made CAP stand out as an outlier from myriads of tech training initiatives in Nigeria. In essence, don't just execute and end there, test your hypothesis, gather feedback, and learn from this feedback to improve your model.

Testing is fundamental in my design thinking process. By trialing prototypes with our target audience, we gather valuable feedback and observe real-world interactions, ensuring our strategies are effective and user-centric. This iterative process is crucial for refining our social impact initiatives, allowing us to make necessary adjustments based on practical insights. It’s a practice that turns good intentions into impactful, lasting change.

Continuous reflection is integral to my approach in social impact. Design thinking, being cyclical, demands we regularly evaluate and adapt our strategies. This commitment to ongoing improvement ensures our initiatives remain effective and responsive to community needs, keeping us ahead in making a meaningful difference. Embracing this iterative process is crucial for sustaining impact and adapting to emerging challenges.