Want to change the world, your school, or your community? Ideas, marketing, research, and planning are all important whether you want to solve a social problem or exploit an opportunity. Solving problems and exploiting opportunities both need to proceed from a set organizing principles.
Some basic principles can be applied to social betterment projects of any scale or cost or complexity. A partial list of valuable social betterment principles is described in this article.
1. Targeted innovation
Focus on social and technological innovations that attack the root of a problem, not just one or more symptoms. Poverty can be eliminated by giving poor people enough money but the real causes of poverty, like institutional racism and lack of education, could also be addressed.
2. Empirical approach
Use data, systematic observations, and formal analytical tools to understand the current situation and the impacts of your own efforts. Statistics on people, the economy, lifestyles, and attitudes are easy to find online. The basics of good survey research are easy to learn and apply.
3. Leverage
Look for ways to attack a social problem that will give the best results for your resources. This information will come from creatively developing various options and comparing the costs and benefits of two or three viable approaches. An approach is a general way to tackle a problem, while the products of your other brainstorming efforts will be specific tactics.
4. Formalism
Use a system to structure and explore challenges, create evaluation criteria for ideas, generate ideas, evaluate ideas, decide what to do, and monitor results. Again, this is not as complicated as it might seem. Books like Serious Creativity by Edward De Bono, The Creative Problem Solver's Toolbox by Richard Fobes and How to Think Like Einstein by Scott Thorpe offer creative problem-solving structures.
5. Marketing Mindset
Think of yourself as being in sales or advertising, with your services or ideas being sold to benefit people.Marketing messages are always crafted to appeal to a certain sort of person. Some marketing questions to consider include the following:
- Who is the audience for your message? Why? What can you offer that group of people?
- How do you reach your audience?
- What benefit(s) will the audience get for doing what you want?
- What do you have to offer your audience?
- Why would the audience believe that they will get whatever benefit(s) you are promising?
Study copy writing principles if your plan causes for relying mainly on the written word to raise money or influence behavior. Know what motivates people and which of the moitvaotrs you can use to get people to act on your message.
6. Design Thinking
Consider how your idea fits with the culture, economic situation, physical infrastructure, available technology, and the political climate. Products and services are always crated for a certain audience, to meet their wants and needs, not to sell something that people should want or should do. Successful products and services are also designed to fit peoples' budgets, working styles, schedules, and preferences. People in the United States often like to trade convenience for money. That preference creates a huge market for expensive, convenient microwaveable meals.
7. Values Thinking
Your idea must fit with prevailing values, lifestyles, beliefs, and attitudes; the closer the fit, the greater the odds of success. Selling a solution to a problem might work better if we can relate the problem to things people value. A Roper Poll on global values identified the world's top ten values: protecting the family, honesty, health and fitness, self-esteem, self-reliance, justice, freedom, friendship, knowledge, learning.
The rankings are based on the percentage of respondents who said the value is "extremely important " to them. People aren't going to change their beliefs or lifestyles or attitudes because they "should" according to some activist's agenda.
How does the idea in question support or reinforce one or more of those ten values? A credible answer means a better chance of selling your idea. Of course, people have different ideas about what those values mean. "Protecting the family" might mean there is no legal recognition for same-sex partnerships. Self-reliance might mean that there are no welfare programs because people should look out for themselves.
