040: 4 Questions To Ask Every Poverty Fighting Program (Slingshot Stories)

If you're trying to evaluate the effectiveness of a poverty fighting program, here are 4 questions you can ask. Ed Gillentine and Jared Barnett will break these down in today's episode of Slingshot Stories.

Show Links

Ed Gillentine:
EdGillentine.com
Instagram: @journey.to.impact

Slingshot Memphis
www.slingshotmemphis.org
LinkedIn
Instagram: @slingshotmemphis
Email: disrupt@slingshotmemphis.org

Transcript

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:24:21
Ed
Welcome to Slingshot Stories, a series produced in collaboration with the Journey to Impact and Slingshot Memphis. I'm Ed Gillentine and I'll be co-hosting along with my partner in Impact, Jared Barnett, the CEO of Slingshot Memphis. We've got another fantastic topic today. Although, Jared, I kind of feel like all our topics are pretty fantastic, but this one I know is near and dear to your heart, and it's how to triage the effectiveness of poverty fighting programs.

00:00:24:21 - 00:00:29:00
Ed
So that's a bit of a mouthful when you think about that. What goes through your head?

00:00:29:01 - 00:00:53:10
Jared
Yeah, what goes through my head is that there's a lot of poverty fighting organizations. They many of them offer multiple programs as an individual philanthropist. How do I have any clue if these things are actually helping? And so, you know, what I like about, you know, our our topic here today is there's a few just simple questions that you can ask that aren't going to give you all the details around their effectiveness.

00:00:53:10 - 00:01:03:11
Jared
But I'm going to give you a really good idea if what they're doing is actually likely leading to good outcomes or it's just a good effort, but maybe not having the results that you would hope for.

00:01:03:12 - 00:01:17:17
Ed
Yeah. So when you think about we've talked a lot about outcomes, right? So it's probably a good place to start. But what are a couple of your favorite questions to ask that really get at what an organization's doing?

00:01:17:21 - 00:01:38:13
Jared
There's kind of four questions and I'll rattle them off here and then we can talk about them all here. So first one is what are the outcomes that the program is intended to produce? Two, how to design your program. Three How do you ensure it's being implemented as intended? And then four How do you know the program's actually working?

00:01:38:13 - 00:01:55:15
Ed
So it sounds like we got a little McKenzie background coming out. You talk about this, you and I are we we are shaped by our business background. Yeah, but yeah when you talk about what are the outcomes in your you're asking an organization that question, what do you want to hear.

00:01:56:00 - 00:02:20:11
Jared
Yeah. So at the root of it, I want to hear something that would improve the health or income of a participant. And so it's easy, I think, and especially in poverty, fighting to focus on the outputs, which we would think of, like what's that program like, the endpoint of that program, like we're trying to graduate a number of people from the program or, you know, we want to help so many people get this type of thing or achieve this.

00:02:21:10 - 00:02:48:07
Jared
What I want to hear, though, and what's helpful to understand is if that organization can tell you they're going through this program and as a result of that, it improves this, this and this for the participants in the program, that has to do with something that is related to their health, their income. That's a great sign that that organization has their mind in the right spot because they're focusing and they understand what they're trying to do, where otherwise it's very easy to kind of get lost in the process and lost in kind of the inertia.

00:02:48:16 - 00:02:52:18
Jared
And and so you just do the program because that's what the person doing before you.

00:02:53:04 - 00:03:06:12
Ed
You kind of reminds me of Memphis inner city rugby. We had let's I'm making up some numbers we had 100 kids go through the program this year and our varsity rugby team was, you know, eight and two. I don't know how many games they play, but that's not the point, is it?

00:03:07:04 - 00:03:26:10
Jared
No. And even if you say that to the point of his to win rugby games, right, to, you know, let students play rugby, I say, well, that's great. But how does that improve their income or their health? Right. All right. And so for Memphis interested rugby, what they'll say is, well, our job is to help students get into college, help them persist in college, do that in a cost effective way as possible.

00:03:26:10 - 00:03:35:16
Jared
So they have as limited student debt as they can. And the end goal of that is to help them then get into careers. Right. That provide a transformative level of income compared to what they experienced growing up.

00:03:35:20 - 00:03:51:23
Ed
And that's how, in my mind, that's exactly how that question is supposed to help you understand that they come back and say, we're eight know and we won the rugby championship. Okay, we need to know a little bit more about it. You said something about designing the program. How do they design it? Talk about that for a minute.

00:03:51:23 - 00:04:11:01
Jared
Yeah. So every organization has some reason for coming up with a program. And so understanding the why behind that and how they did that is really insightful. And so there's instances I'll share a few examples here. So you could go to them and say, Hey, like, how did you design this program? Like what was the impetus behind it?

00:04:11:01 - 00:04:30:10
Jared
And they'd be like, Well, you know, we studied a bunch of other programs, we found some academic research and we realized, you know, by doing this and doing this, that's the best way to achieve this outcome. That was we told you earlier it was our intended outcome. And so that tends to be the best in class way of doing things, because what you've done is you've taken what's been proven to work.

00:04:30:11 - 00:04:32:09
Ed
You're not reinventing the wheel exactly.

00:04:32:09 - 00:04:48:13
Jared
And you're applying that and you may have to adapt it a little bit. Right. What works in San Francisco or Minneapolis may be different than what works in Memphis, but you take those practices and you apply them. And again, there's a high probability that they worked in those cities. You can find a way to get them to work here, and there's research behind that.

00:04:49:10 - 00:05:09:21
Jared
Alternatively, you could say, Well, I saw like a really successful city in our program in this city or in a different part of the city, and that inspired me to want to do that here. And so that's helpful because at least somebody is doing it. And if you can see that they're having some good outcomes, that's great. But what you don't know is, is that program as effective as it could be?

00:05:10:12 - 00:05:26:08
Jared
Right. And so it's it's you see it doing something and, you know, you're basing it off something that already exists. So that's helpful. But it doesn't actually always answer is it is the most effective. And then the other way that you I've seen this done is, you know, you build a program based on the needs that you observe.

00:05:26:16 - 00:05:44:15
Jared
So you're in a poverty fighting program and your participants keep complaining about a certain need that they have. And you say, Well, hey, we could do something about that. And so you design a program and say, well, meet that need. There is an element of research in there because you're adapting to something that, you know, people need that's, you know, just like consumer research, right?

00:05:44:15 - 00:06:02:15
Jared
It's great, you know, that. But their challenge was by doing that, if you haven't looked at other programs, if you haven't reviewed kind of best practices for that, you don't know. And that nonprofit doesn't know if their approach to meeting that need is the most effective approach to that. And so by asking that question, how did you kind of design your program?

00:06:02:15 - 00:06:11:07
Jared
What went into it? You can see how what they've done and then have a perspective around how effective that might be because of how they decided to design it.

00:06:11:07 - 00:06:23:13
Ed
I think it also gives you some insight into how the brain works and how they think it does you. One of your questions was how do you know that the program is being implemented as intended? Why is that important?

00:06:23:19 - 00:06:42:16
Jared
This is great, right? So we all have had, you know, great plans, right? Well, that's a five year plan for our careers or whether that's, you know, a financial strategy or, you know, an exercise goal. Right. All right. We're going to the six packs. Come back. I'm going to get there. You know, but the reality is those plans meet reality.

00:06:42:17 - 00:07:04:03
Jared
Right. And so the key the key on this one is how does that organization ensure that what they designed and what they want to happen is actually happening? And so good organizations. Right. Have a way to do that in business. Right. If I'm a manufacturing facility, I am going to have ways that ensure that the best process to make that widget is always being adhered to.

00:07:04:03 - 00:07:29:13
Jared
Because I don't want to have widgets that are different because customers get mad at me if it doesn't fit and you know where it's supposed to fit. And so nonprofits, those practices can be applied here as well. And you can say, okay, well, how do you know that it's being implemented? And they might say, Hey, I have a report where we know we go out and audit these programs every month, or we conduct surveys with our participants to see what their experience has been like and understand, as you know, Participant A's experience the same as Participant B's experience.

00:07:29:13 - 00:07:43:07
Jared
There's different ways of doing that, but they need to have some way of saying, I know that it's being implemented as I want. Otherwise you're just hoping and praying that that great design you might have come up with is actually translating to the experience that the participant has.

00:07:43:12 - 00:07:52:18
Ed
And then your last question, how do you know a program is producing intended outcomes? I mean, that's the bottom line, right, if you will. To use a business analogy, it is.

00:07:52:18 - 00:08:13:12
Jared
And I mean, if you had to ask one question, I might just jump to this one. Sure. Because at the end of the day, if that organization can explain how they know that their program is is helping its participants, then nobody knows. Right? Right. Because they're the closest to it. And so, you know, I think this one's important to to also be able to understand.

00:08:13:12 - 00:08:32:05
Jared
Can they tell you a story of one or two people who might have experienced something versus can they tell you a pattern of what people experience? It's very different. Right. And a, nonprofits were very good at telling stories. Right. Some of the best storytellers ever met are nonprofits because that's how they've learned how to gain funding, how to communicate what they do.

00:08:32:10 - 00:08:48:06
Jared
And storytelling has a very important part of galvanizing people to support what you do. But if you want to make sure it's effective, right, there needs to be that pattern, right? I wouldn't go invest in a business. That said, I made one good product and it was really good and I sold it to one customer and they were really happy.

00:08:48:17 - 00:09:10:01
Jared
And then every other customer they worked with got the wrong product and had a horrible experience right like that that doesn't fly right. And so I think being able to understand that pattern, is there a way that they can tell me that their participants are experiencing and know that they're experiencing these outcomes and there's a pattern of that that they can share with me that would give me a high degree of confidence that that organization's program is effective.

00:09:10:10 - 00:09:25:07
Ed
Fantastic Four great questions that I think will really, really help our listeners get to the meat of organizations and I think ultimately help them be a more efficient and more effective with their philanthropy and their impact.