Scaling user-centric innovation
Strategies for better serving beneficiaries
By Ishaan Bansal (‘24 Strategy Fellow)
Innovations often fail when they don't understand or address the needs of their end users. When YouTube launched its video upload feature for iOS in 2010, 5%-10% of the videos appeared on the platform upside-down. The problem wasn’t users' filming but the app design, which catered to right-handed people – undermining the feature’s usability.
The social sector faces similar challenges. The multi-million dollar PlayPumps initiative, for instance, was designed to use the energy from children’s play to pump water in African communities but failed to engage local communities or understand their needs. The pumps were hastily installed in unsuitable locations and children were put on "play schedules" to meet water demands, turning play into labor – issues that could have been avoided with a more user-centered, thoughtful approach.
To genuinely support people in their efforts to thrive, we must prioritize their experiences and aspirations at every step of the innovation process. Putting beneficiaries at the core of innovation ensures that their needs, local knowledge, and lived experiences guide decisions, allowing for solutions that are better tailored to their context and more likely to succeed. Drawing on existing best practice, this blog explores how beneficiary-centric approaches and robust, collaborative knowledge-sharing can help cultivate and scale innovations across the social sector.
Key user-centric approaches
Continuous feedback, testing, and iteration can help address these challenges and ensure that social sector innovations are grounded in beneficiaries’ real-world experiences. At the recent sprint co-hosted by The Agency Fund and Project Tech4Dev in Bangalore, we discussed how organizations can pivot towards more beneficiary-centric approaches. Effective tactics include:
Developing “personas”: Identifying the different types or personas of users who interact with your program (both quantitatively derived and qualitatively constructed) and developing beneficiary “journey maps” that characterize how users interact are important components of user-centric design.
Constructing user funnels: User funnels help track how people interact with your program and can reveal critical insights about user behaviors across the program’s stages, from onboarding and engagement to retention and impact. These insights can be tracked and analyzed.
Qualitative insights: Centering beneficiaries in the innovation process means ensuring that their needs, lived experiences, and perspectives drive decision-making and shape the trajectory of program development and execution.
Sandboxing and A/B testing: Organizations can test insights from beneficiaries, frontline workers, and other sources in controlled environments like sandboxes and A/B tests, where different hypothesized modifications of a program can be simultaneously analyzed. For example, after Rocket Learning experimented with different naming conventions for their WhatsApp-based learning program, some of the improvements led to a 26 percent increase in user retention.
These simple, low-cost approaches not only lead to program enhancements but, when embedded in organizational practices, foster continual learning and long-term growth for social sector organizations.
Designing organizations for user-centric innovation
To create innovations that can address today’s complex social issues, how we organize our teams is just as crucial as what interventions we design. This requires enhancing employees’ agency and empowering them to exercise greater creativity and ownership over their work. Innovative organizational models can help, such as:
Customized programs: “Personas” can be developed through a combination of qualitative work (i.e. user interviews and observations) and quantitative methods (i.e., segmentation on user behavior using product or admin data). The interplay of these two approaches can help intervention designers develop and test more customized programs for each user group.
Cross-functional teams: Diverse expertise and perspectives are crucial for addressing complexity. Cross-functional teams can foster collaboration, bolster creativity, and increase the speed of innovation. An example from the private sector is Spotify’s squad model, which structures diverse teams like mini-startups to independently design, develop, test, and deploy solutions for specific goals, like improving recommendations. Squads often apply lean startup principles, creating “minimal viable products” and using rapid learning. Innovative social sector organizations can experiment with similar structures to promote collaboration across expertise and faster testing of new ideas.
Innovation labs: Dedicated innovation labs encourage creativity and risk-taking by focusing on learning and experimentation outside the constraints of day-to-day operations. Examples already exist in the social sector: BRAC’s Social Innovation Lab, for instance, fosters innovation by testing and prototyping new ideas before scaling them. Teach For All’s Global Learning Lab gathers, learns from, and spreads education insights and innovations from classrooms and communities around the world.
Flexible time: While it can be challenging for resource-constrained social sector organizations, budgeting for and encouraging employees to work on interesting, business-relevant problems of their choice can promote innovation. Google’s “20% time” policy, for example – which allows employees to spend a fifth of their time on such projects – contributed to innovations like Gmail and Google Maps. In the social sector, unrestricted or innovation-focused grants from funders are critical for enabling such flexible and creative organizational models.
Creating learning organizations that can scale
Organizational learning is essential for user-centric innovation, but learning while also scaling is challenging. There are trade-offs between the flexible systems that encourage learning and the routine processes needed for scale. If every minor adjustment requires deviation from core processes, there is little incentive to embrace change. But organizations can cultivate a culture of continuous improvement by creating systems that empower teams to own their own learning and growth. Robust, collaborative learning mechanisms can help:
User-friendly learning & knowledge management: Creating accessible platforms to meaningfully codify and share learning experiences from past experiments, product launches, and pilots can help staff find and apply shared knowledge. For example, The Agency Fund is creating a registry for A/B tests – similar to the RCT registry – where organizations can register their experiments to promote accountability and identify benchmarks for user engagement across the social sector.
Real-time feedback: Investing in systems to easily analyze and visualize key metrics is often crucial for organizational learning. Data systems can help automate the process of experimentation and analysis while strengthening monitoring (e.g. simple but informative slack or email reminders when metrics fall below certain thresholds). A low-cost private sector example, Amazon’s Connections, gathers employee feedback by asking one simple question every day.
Peer-to-peer learning: Collaboration in the social sector faces unique challenges, since organizations can't rely on profit-driven incentives for partnerships or mergers – so leadership by funders, founders, and social sector managers is needed to create opportunities, mechanisms, and incentives for collaborative learning. Setting up regular in-person gatherings, workshops, and structured peer review sessions can help facilitate the exchange of ideas and experiences among staff within and across organizations.
Scaling user-centric innovation in the social sector is a formidable but urgent challenge. More than anything, it requires organizations to prioritize the needs of those they serve, empower their teams for creativity, and foster systems that promote continuous learning. By embracing these strategies, social sector organizations can spur the innovations that will drive more meaningful and sustainable impact.