Tweeting, Tinkering, and Transforming

During his two terms as Mayor of Indianapolis, Stephen Goldsmith reduced government spending, curbed the city’s bureaucracy, eliminated counterproductive regulations, and identified more than $400 million in municipal savings. He is the author of several books, including The Power of Social Innovation: How Civic Entrepreneurs Ignite Community Networks for Good, Governing by the Network: the New Shape of the Public Sector, and Putting Faith in Neighborhoods: Making Cities Work through Grassroots Citizenship.

Much of your writing discusses how cross-sector social innovation can better serve the public good. What is a social innovation market, and how do you suggest we match social needs on the demand side with social innovations on the supply side?

We ought to secure the best possible social solutions given available dollars. We have too many problems for which we don’t have effective solutions and too many people that need help. Irrespective of how much money we spend, I think we can all agree that we need to spend more effectively. The system needs more innovative disruption.

We have problems on both the supply and the demand side. On the supply side, money often funds activities instead of outcomes and funds the same activities year after year. On the demand side, we have folks with subdued voices who are viewed as the objects of government rather than informed and engaged clients. The goal should be to think about how to create a better market for social entrepreneurs in order to provide answers for important and intractable social problems.

What roles can public, private, or civic leaders play in fostering a more effective innovation market, and how does a community-driven approach differ from a top-down governmental approach?

We can think about this approach in two different ways. Local communities can be more deliberate about offering venture and social innovation funds. Instead of issuing inflexible requests for proposals or highly prescriptive grants, foundations and governments ought to be asking, “How can you help us solve our high school dropout problem?” or “How can you help us solve our abuse issue?” We should let organizations creatively respond to and petition for available funding.

Another thing we can do locally is demand results. Too often the government funds activities year after year that aren’t making a difference. We should demand higher accountability. Specifically, providing more venture funding that purchases outcomes would create a better market.

You talk about flexibility and eliminating grant application procedures that are overly prescriptive. How do we create a more outcome-driven approach that allows social entrepreneurs to do their work more effectively?

Currently, funds flow through narrowly crafted government and philanthropic silos which address a specific need in a prescriptive fashion. Solutions to complex social issues, however, must be much more dynamic, collaborative, and horizontal. Social innovators advocate for better solutions. In addition, social innovation doesn’t have to be only a supply innovation. Social innovation can be a catalytic effort on the demand side, too. Some social innovation programs, like Stand for Children, are advocacy organizations that promote better outcomes. Community and family foundations should be activist investors. They ought to demand results, sit on the boards of grant recipients, and become more deeply immersed in what’s working and what’s not working. The community as a whole can play a role in demanding better results and providing room for new approaches.

How do we clear the barriers that silence the demand side of the market?

These barriers to innovation and change are a big issue. I hope that funders, including government, will look more actively to giving clients a larger say in choosing which programs work for them. For instance, we can ask people to “tweet” back their satisfaction with a workforce program. Many residents in need of services are currently voiceless. Their views need to be taken into consideration because too often the funders are present, and the users are not.

You mention “tweeting” as one way that citizens can express their needs and concerns. What is the role of technology in this process?

Technology opens up new opportunities. We have data analytics that can help us determine what works. We have decision support systems that can tell field workers where to refer a person in trouble, matching that person with the relevant services of an organization. Given new tools, such as smartphones, the digital divide will no longer preclude interactivity and feedback loops among and from people who are using social services.

Considering feedback and performance-driven social services, how do we hold government and the social sector accountable to performance outcomes? How do we measure if they are successful or not?

Measurement is difficult in the social sector because there are so many drivers of success. There’s always an excuse for not being effective because there are so many confounding factors at play. Nevertheless we should still demand results. Financing collaborative interventions through social innovation funding, as opposed to vertical interventions, has a higher chance of success. It is also important to have a clear understanding of the desired outcomes.

Why is social innovation so difficult to scale?

There are different ways to look at this. We might spend some time defining what “scale” means. Does “scale” mean a program gets bigger? Does “scale” mean it franchises programs in other cities? Does “scale” mean it changes a policy? We seem to be too focused on how smaller organizations become large and successful. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that definition of scale, but that’s not the only way to scale success. The other issue that’s worth considering is that maybe there’s something about scale that dilutes some of the key elements that made an initiative successful when it was small. If one concentrates on scale without meaningful local autonomy, then the model may yield less benefit. Aligning local responsiveness and scale is both critical and difficult.

How do you describe the distinction between scale and impact?

If one decides that the goal is for every disadvantaged child in Florida to have quality early childhood education, and one runs a public campaign to provide universal preschool, in this model, scale is defined as impacting the greatest number of children. Alternatively, you could say, “I’m going to run the highest quality early childhood education preschool in Florida, and I’m going to make sure the fifty kids I have enrolled will be the best trained.” That is greater impact for those fifty kids. So it depends on the unit that you’re trying to impact.

You’ve written about repurposing unproductive resources. Can you explain how we could reallocate public resources to better serve the public good?

There are two ways to think about the redirection of public resources. One is to redirect resources from programs that are not working to programs that are working by looking at outcomes instead of activities. The other redirects resources by giving the people in the programs, the field workers in particular, more discretion. Public employees can accomplish so much more with more discretion. People go into public service because they want to help others. Then they find themselves in these tight little boxes where they cannot produce good results because they spend all their time complying with rules, with paperwork, and the like. Now, with digital tools, we can hold workers more accountable, allowing them a better chance to tailor results to individual clients. We no longer have to choose between accountability and discretion.

Feature photo: cc/Cayusa