Posts Tagged ‘EVOLUTIONARY work’
Social Impact?
When uscreates was planning a new website, the team realized that other people may not understand the term “social impact”. Sure, it’s a recognized and much-used phrase among the social impact community, but what does it mean out there in the real world?
Can you share your experience and the alternative terms that you used to clarify the meaning of social impact?
Connect with uscreates for examples of Public Social design projects, like this Was a pleasure working with #MAD4D @KingstonUni through #designthinking #workshops to create #Volunteering models http://t.co/wciLcdqqvG.
In Comfort Zone, Point of View, the team of uscreates posted on March 26, 2013:
As trusted friends and contacts of Uscreates, we are hoping you can help us with a problem.
Over the years we’ve built up a reputation for being thought leaders in social impact. We’ve wowed clients with our results, and we have won awards.
Oddly, this leaves us with a problem.
We have spent the last 10 years working with public sector clients, and we’re used to talking in a certain way about the work we do.
We talk in this way when we speak to our colleagues, business contacts and others who are passionate about social impact.
It was only when we were planning our new website that we realised that other people may not understand the term “social impact”. Sure, it’s a recognized and much-used phrase among the social impact community, but what does it mean out there in the real world?
Why does this matter?
Well, we are hoping to use our skills and experience to help clients from different sectors with their social impact work. But if they don’t understand what we mean, how can we communicate that we can help them achieve some of their business goals in our unique, positive and creative way?
So, that’s where you come in. What is your answer to “What is social impact?”
Is it a meaningless jargon or a pithy way to communicate what we do?
Do you use it? What could we use instead?
To join the conversation, tweet us @uscreates hashtag #whatissocialimpact or chat with us on our LinkedIn page.
Note 1: I would substitute Social Impact with Community Share.
1. Social connote a magnitude at the national scale in impact, an idea that is not welcomed since people are wary of State imposing on them large scale plans and programs without effective large scale communication input and feedback. I’m inclined to feel that social impact sends the message of a large scale change.
2. No change takes place without starting on a smaller community-based dialogue and sharing with the project. A community can share and appreciate what they agreed upon and disseminate the change to the neighboring communities.
Note 2: Joanna Choukeir Hojeily shared Uscreates‘s photo.
April 3rd, 6.30pm to 9.15pm @ the Hub Westminster
Last year I developed InnovaChart, a tool to measure our Innovation at Uscreates and ensure we are contributing new and good practice to the social impact landscape. For us to reach a ‘healthy’ level of innovation our work should aim to reach the following goals:
- 25% REVOLUTIONARY work: working with entirely new audiences, on entirely new issues, while creating entirely new offerings within Uscreates
- 25% EVOLUTIONARY work: two novel territories, and one existing territory (for example the issue could be something we have worked on before, but we’re now approaching a new audience and creating a new offering)
- 25% INCREMENTAL work: two existing territories, and one novel territory (for example the audience and type of offering is familiar to us, but we’re tackling a new issue)
- 25% MINIMAL work: working with existing audiences, on existing issues, while creating similar offerings.
We used InnovaChart to look at the yearly innovation of our internal and external projects in 2011 and 2012 and this is what we found out:
- Although we worked on more projects in 2012, we were less REVOLUTIONARY in our projects than in 2011
- Although we were more REVOLUTIONARY in 2011, our MINIMAL innovation rate was too low which means we were taking too much risk treading too many new territories
- Our EVOLUTIONARY, INCREMENTAL and MINIMAL innovation is in a healthier range in 2012 than it was in 2011
- We need to REVOLUTIONISE about 5% of each of our MINIMAL, INCREMENTAL and EVOLUTIONARY work to meet our 25% targets in 2013
Overall, our 2012 results seem closer to the ‘healthy’ targets, but are still not there yet. So this is what we plan to do in 2013 to foresee results early on and intervene at the right time:
We will use InnovaChart before the work commences as well as after it has been completed. This way, InnovaChart would also act as a forecasting tool during key innovation decision points in the business:
1. “Should we go for this project?”
2. “We’ve done a similar piece of work before, how can we make it better?”
3. “do we design a more novel methodology?”
4. “are we being too risky on this one?”
Get in touch if you would like to use InnovaChart to measure the innovation of your business.
Adonis Diaries 