Podcast by Civilla: “One team’s mission to poke the universe. Civilla, a center for social innovation based in Detroit, was founded by a small team with big plans. This podcast is an inside peek at their journey as they work to create positive impact in the lives of one billion people. Season One follows the ups and downs as they assemble their very first $100 Million idea. Stories are captured in real time and shared out weekly. Key themes include: civic leadership, social innovation, philanthropy, human-centered design, change work, government, and courageous leadership….(More)”
How Snapchat Is Recruiting Bone Marrow Donors
PSFK: “Every ten minutes, blood cancer takes a life away. One of the ways to treat this disease is through stem cell transplants that create healthy blood cells. Since 70% of patients who need a transplant cannot find a match in their family, they need to turn to outside donors. In an effort to increase the number of bone marrow donors in the registry, Be The Match turned to Snapchat to find male donors from the ages of 18 to 24.
The aim of the campaign “Be the Guy” is to release short videos on Snapchat of regular guys acting silly. This emphasizes the idea that literally anyone can save a life, no matter who—or how quirky—you are. With a swipe up, any Snapchat user will be directed to a form that makes it easy to sign up to be a donor. To complete the registration, all it takes is to receive a kit in the mail and mail back a swap from your cheek….(More)”
Data at the Speed of Life
Marc Gunther at The Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Can pregnant women in Zambia be persuaded to deliver their babies in hospitals or clinics rather than at home? How much are villagers in Cambodia willing to pay for a simple latrine? What qualities predict success for a small-scale entrepreneur who advises farmers?
Governments, foundations, and nonprofits that want to help the world’s poor regularly face questions like these. Answers are elusive. While an estimated $135 billion in government aid and another $15 billion in charitable giving flow annually to developing countries, surprisingly few projects benefit from rigorous evaluations. Those that do get scrutinized in academic studies often don’t see the results for years, long after the projects have ended.
IDinsight puts data-driven research on speed. Its goal is to produce useful, low-cost research results fast enough that nonprofits can use it make midcourse corrections to their programs….
IDinsight calls this kind of research “decision-focused evaluation,” which sets it apart from traditional monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and academic research. M&E, experts say, is mostly about accountability and outputs — how many training sessions were held, how much food was distributed, and so on. Usually, it occurs after a program is complete. Academic studies are typically shaped by researchers’ desire to break new ground and publish on topics of broad interest. The IDinsight approach aims instead “for contemporaneous decision-making rather than for publication in the American Economic Review,” says Ruth Levine, who directs the global development program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
A decade ago, Ms. Levine and William Savedoff, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, wrote an influential paper entitled “When Will We Ever Learn? Improving Lives Through Impact Evaluation.” They lamented that an “absence of evidence” for the effectiveness of global development programs “not only wastes money but denies poor people crucial support to improve their lives.”
Since then, impact evaluation has come a “huge distance,” Ms. Levine says….
Actually, others are. Innovations for Poverty Action recently created the Goldilocks Initiative to do what it calls “right fit” evaluations leading to better policy and programs, according to Thoai Ngo, who leads the effort. Its first clients include GiveDirectly, which facilitates cash transfers to the extreme poor, and Splash, a water charity….All this focus on data has generated pushback. Many nonprofits don’t have the resources to do rigorous research, according to Debra Allcock Tyler, chief executive at Directory of Social Change, a British charity that provides training, data, and other resources for social enterprises.
All this focus on data has generated pushback. Many nonprofits don’t have the resources to do rigorous research, according to Debra Allcock Tyler, chief executive at Directory of Social Change, a British charity that provides training, data, and other resources for social enterprises.
“A great deal of the time, data is pointless,” Allcock Tyler said last year at a London seminar on data and nonprofits. “Very often it is dangerous and can be used against us, and sometimes it takes away precious resources from other things that we might more usefully do.”
A bigger problem may be that the accumulation of knowledge does not necessarily lead to better policies or practices.
“People often trust their experience more than a systematic review,” says Ms. Levine of the Hewlett Foundation. IDinsight’s Esther Wang agrees. “A lot of our frustration is looking at the development world and asking why are we not accountable for the money that we are spending,” she says. “That’s a waste that none of us really feels is justifiable.”…(More)”
Mapping and Comparing Responsible Data Approaches
New report by Jos Berens, Ulrich Mans and Stefaan Verhulst: “Recent years have witnessed something of a sea-change in the way humanitarian organizations consider and use data. Growing awareness of the potential of data has led to new enthusiasm and new, innovative applications that seek to respond to and mitigate crises in fresh ways. At the same time, it has become apparent that the potential benefits are accompanied by risks. A new framework is needed that can help balance the benefits and risks, and that can aid humanitarian organizations and others (e.g., policymakers) develop a more responsible approach to data collection and use in their efforts to combat natural and man-made crises around the world. …
The report we are releasing today, “Mapping and Comparing Responsible Data Approaches”, attempts to guide the first steps toward such a framework by learning from current approaches and principles. It is the outcome of a joint research project commissioned by UNOCHA and conducted in collaboration between the GovLab at NYU and Leiden University. In an effort to better understand the landscape, we have considered existing data use policies and principles from 17 organizations. These include 7 UN agencies, 7 International Organizations, 2 government agencies and 1 research institute. Our study of these organizations’ policies allowed us to extract a number of key takeaways that, together, amount to something like a roadmap for responsible data use for any humanitarian organization considering using data in new ways.
We began our research by closely mapping the existing responsible data use policies. To do this, we developed a template with eight broad themes that determines the key ingredients of responsible data framework. This use of a consistent template across organizations permits us to study and compare the 17 data use policies in a structured and systematic manner. Based on this template, we were able to extract 7 key takeaways for what works best when using data in a humanitarian context – presented in the conclusion to the paper being released today. They are designed to be broad enough to be broadly applicable, yet specific enough to be operational and actually usable….(More)”
Due Diligence? We need an app for that
Ken Banks at kiwanja.net: “The ubiquity of mobile phones, the reach of the Internet, the shear number of problems facing the planet, competitions and challenges galore, pots of money and strong media interest in tech-for-good projects has today created the perfect storm. Not a day goes by without the release of an app hoping to solve something, and the fact so many people are building so many apps to fix so many problems can only be a good thing. Right?
The only problem is this. It’s become impossible to tell good from bad, even real from fake. It’s something of a Wild West out there. So it was no surprise to see this happening recently. Quoting The Guardian:
An app which purported to offer aid to refugees lost in the Mediterranean has been pulled from Apple’s App Store after it was revealed as a fake. The I Sea app, which also won a Bronze medal at the Cannes Lions conference on Monday night, presented itself as a tool to help report refugees lost at sea, using real-time satellite footage to identify boats in trouble and highlighting their location to the Malta-based Migrant Offshore Aid Station (Moas), which would provide help.
In fact, the app did nothing of the sort. Rather than presenting real-time satellite footage – a difficult and expensive task – it instead simply shows a portion of a static, unchanging image. And while it claims to show the weather in the southern Mediterranean, that too isn’t that accurate: it’s for Western Libya.
The worry isn’t only that someone would decide to build a fake app which ‘tackles’ such an emotive subject, but the fact that this particular app won an award and received favourable press. Wired, Mashable, the Evening Standard and Reuters all spoke positively about it. Did no-one check that it did what it said it did?
This whole episode reminds me of something Joel Selanikio wrote in his contributing chapter to two books I’ve recently edited and published. In his chapters, which touch on his work on the Magpi data collection tool in addition to some of the challenges facing the tech-for-development community, Joel wrote:
In going over our user activity logs for the online Magpi app, I quickly realised that no-one from any of our funding organisations was listed. Apparently no-one who was paying us had ever seen our working software! This didn’t seem to make sense. Who would pay for software without ever looking at it? And if our funders hadn’t seen the software, what information were they using when they decided whether to fund us each year?
…The shear number of apps available that claim to solve all manner of problems may seem encouraging on the surface – 1,500 (and counting) to help refugees might be a case in point – but how many are useful? How many are being used? How many solve a problem? And how many are real?
Due diligence? Maybe it’s time we had an app for that…(More)”
What determines social behavior? Investigating the role of emotions, self-centered motives, and social norms.
Special issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience edited by Corrado Corradi-Dell’Acqua, Leonie Koban, Susanne Leiberg and Patrik Vuilleumier: “In the last decade, a growing research effort in behavioral sciences, especially psychology and neuroscience, has been invested in the study of the cognitive, biological, and evolutionary foundations of social behavior. Differently from the case of sociology, which studies social behavior also at the group level in terms of organizations and structures, psychology and neuroscience often define “social” as a feature of the individual brain that allows an efficient interaction with conspecifics, and thus constitutes a possible evolutionary advantage (Matusall, 2013). …
In the last decades, psychologist and neuroscientists invested a considerable amount of research to investigate the ability to act “socially”, which is considered an evolutionary advantage of many species (Matusall, 2013). The present Research Topic is a collection of a large number (38) of original contributions from an interdisciplinary community which together highlight that determinants of individual social behavior should be best understood along at least two different dimensions. This general perspective represents the backbone for a comprehensive and articulated model of how people and their brains interact with each other in social contexts. However, despite its appeal, it remains unclear how the model put forward in this editorial relates to particular paradigms with high ecological value, where it is more difficult to neatly disentangle the relative contribution of personal/environmental or stable/transient determinants. This is for instance the case of Preston et al. (2013) who investigated hospitalized terminal patients, measuring the emotional reactions elicited in observers and whether they were related to the frequency with which aid was delivered. In this perspective, a great challenge for future research in social psychology and neuroscience will indeed be to develop more accurate predictive models of social behavior and to make them applicable to ecologically valid settings….(More)”
Better research through video games
Simon Parkin at the New Yorker:”… it occurred to Szantner and Revaz that the tremendous amount of time and energy that people put into games could be co-opted in the name of human progress. That year, they founded Massively Multiplayer Online Science, a company that pairs game makers with scientists.
This past March, the first fruits of their conversation in Geneva appeared in EVE Online, a complex science-fiction game set in a galaxy composed of tens of thousands of stars and planets, and inhabited by half a million or so people from across the Internet, who explore and do battle daily. EVE was launched in 2003 by C.C.P., a studio based in Reykjavík, but players have only recently begun to contribute to scientific research. Their task is to assist with the Human Protein Atlas (H.P.A.), a Swedish-run effort to catalogue proteins and the genes that encode them, in both normal tissue and cancerous tumors. “Humans are, by evolution, very good at quickly recognizing patterns,” Emma Lundberg, the director of the H.P.A.’s Subcellular Atlas, a database of high-resolution images of fluorescently dyed cells, told me. “This is what we exploit in the game.”
The work, dubbed Project Discovery, fits snugly into EVE Online’s universe. At any point, players can take a break from their dogfighting, trading, and political machinations to play a simple game within the game, finding commonalities and differences between some thirteen million microscope images. In each one, the cell’s innards have been color-coded—blue for the nucleus (the cell’s brain), red for microtubules (the cell’s scaffolding), and green for anywhere that a protein has been detected. After completing a tutorial, players tag the image using a list of twenty-nine options, including “nucleus,” “cytoplasm,” and “mitochondria.” When enough players reach a consensus on a single image, it is marked as “solved” and handed off to the scientists at the H.P.A. “In terms of the pattern recognition and classification, it resembles what we are doing as researchers,” Lundberg said. “But the game interface is, of course, much cooler than our laboratory information-management system. I would love to work in-game only.”
Rather than presenting the project as a worthy extracurricular activity, EVE Online’s designers have cast it as an extension of the game’s broader fiction. Players work for the Sisters of EVE, a religious humanitarian-aid organization, which rewards their efforts with virtual currency. This can be used to purchase items in the game, including a unique set of armor designed by one of the C.C.P.’s artists, Andrei Cristea. (The armor is available only to players who participate in Project Discovery, and therefore, like a rare Coco Chanel frock, is desirable as much for its scarcity as for its design.) Insuring that the mini-game be thought of as more than a short-term novelty or diversion was an issue that Linzi Campbell, Project Discovery’s lead designer, considered carefully. “The hardest challenge has been turning the image-analysis process into a game that is strong enough to motivate the player to continue playing,” Campbell told me. “The fun comes from the feeling of mastery.”
Evidently, her efforts were successful. On the game’s first day of release, there were four hundred thousand submissions from players. According to C.C.P., some people have been so caught up in the task that they have played for fifteen hours without interruption. “EVE players turned out to be a perfect crowd for this type of citizen science,” Lundberg said. She anticipates that the first phase of the project will be completed this summer. If the work meets this target, players will be presented with more advanced images and tasks, such as the classification of protein patterns in complex tumor-tissue samples. Eventually, their efforts could aid in the development of new cancer drugs….(More)”
Nudging for Success
Press Release: “A groundbreaking report published today by ideas42 reveals several innovations that college administrators and policymakers can leverage to significantly improve college graduation rates at a time where completion is more out of reach than ever for millions of students.
The student path through college to graduation day is strewn with subtle, often invisible barriers that, over time, hinder students’ progress and cause some of them to drop out entirely. In Nudging for Success: Using Behavioral Science to Improve the Postsecondary Student Journey, ideas42 focuses on simple, low-cost ways to combat these unintentional obstacles and support student persistence and success at every stage in the college experience, from pre-admission to post-graduation. Teams worked with students, faculty and administrators at colleges around the country.
Even for students whose tuition is covered by financial aid, whose academic preparation is exemplary, and who are able to commit themselves full-time to their education, the subtle logistical and psychological sticking points can have a huge impact on their ability to persist and fully reap the benefits of a higher education.
Less than 60% of full-time students graduate from four-year colleges within six years, and less than 30% graduate from community colleges within three years. There are a myriad of factors often cited as deterrents to finishing school, such as the cost of tuition or the need to juggle family and work obligations, but behavioral science and the results of this report demonstrate that lesser-known dynamics like self-perception are also at play.
From increasing financial aid filing to fostering positive friend groups and a sense of belonging on campus, the 16 behavioral solutions outlined in Nudging for Success represent the potential for significant impact on the student experience and persistence. At Arizona State University, sending behaviorally-designed email reminders to students and parents about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) priority deadline increased submissions by 72% and led to an increase in grant awards. Freshman retention among low-income, first generation, under-represented or other students most at risk of dropping out increased by 10% at San Francisco State University with the use of a testimonial video, self-affirming exercises, and monthly messaging aimed at first-time students.
“This evidence demonstrates how behavioral science can be the key to uplifting millions of Americans through education,” said Alissa Fishbane, Managing Director at ideas42. “By approaching the completion crisis from the whole experience of students themselves, administrators and policymakers have the opportunity to reduce the number of students who start, but do not finish, college—students who take on the financial burden of tuition but miss out on the substantial benefits of earning a degree.”
The results of this work drive home the importance of examining the college experience from the student perspective and through the lens of human behavior. College administrators and policymakers can replicate these gains at institutions across the country to make it simpler for students to complete the degree they started in ways that are often easier and less expensive to implement than existing alternatives—paving the way to stronger economic futures for millions of Americans….(More)”
IRS Unleashes Flood of Searchable Charity Data
Peter Olsen-Phillips in the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “The Internal Revenue Service opened a gusher of information on nonprofits Wednesday by making electronically filed Form 990s available in bulk and in a machine-friendly format.
The material will be available through the Public Data Sets area of Amazon Web Services. It will also include information from digital versions of the 990-EZ form filed by smaller nonprofits and form 990-PFs filed by private foundations.
The change means the public will have quicker and more in-depth access to the 990, the primary disclosure document for and main source of information on tax-exempt organizations. The form includes data on groups’ finances, board members, executive pay, fundraising expenses, and other aspects of their operations.
The filings were previously made public as PDF documents, requiring costly manual entry or imprecise character-recognition technology to extract the data in bulk and make it searchable. Now the information can be downloaded and parsed for free by anyone with a computer.
“With e-file data, you can easily and precisely extract individual items on the form,” Carl Malamud, an open-government advocate and the president of Public.Resource.org, wrote in an email. The nonprofit works to make public information more accessible, and Mr. Malamud has been at the forefront of efforts to liberate data on the nonprofit sector.
…Despite the enhanced transparency, much nonprofit data will remain hard to find and laborious to analyze, as nearly a third of all 990s were filed on paper in 2015.
Mr. McLean said it’s mainly smaller nonprofits that opt to file a paper 990 with the IRS, adding that he hopes recent legislative efforts to require mandatory electronic filing gain traction….(More)”.
Democracy in Decline: Rebuilding its Future
Book by Philip Kotler: “An examination by the ‘father of modern marketing’ into how well a long cherished product (democracy) is satisfying the needs of its consumers (citizens), bringing conversation and solutions on how we can all do our bit to bring about positive change.
At a time where voting systems are flawed, fewer vote, major corporations fund campaigns and political parties battle it out, democracies are being seriously challenged and with that the prospects of a better world for all.
Philip Kotler identifies 14 shortcomings of today’s democracy and proposes potential remedies whilst encouraging readers to join the conversation, exercise their free speech and get on top of the issues that affect their lives regardless of nationality or political persuasion.
An accompanying website (www.democracyindecline.com) invites those interested to help find and publish thoughtful articles that aid our understanding of what is happening and what can be done to improve democracies around the world….(More)”