Try This Simple Process for Attacking a Social Problem

This short article outlines a technique you can use to focus your efforts to solve social problems through advocacy, public education, program design, or social marketing. What follows is a framework for thinking about how best to attack a given social problem This process should be helpful whether you know what your options are or not. You'll answer a series of questions about the issue starting with the most obvious question of all. 

What is the problem?

What is the challenge or problem you want to tackle? This is a broad social problem, like domestic violence or climate change, or something a bit narrower. Avoid stating that the lack of a specific thing is a problem - no playground in the neighborhood, no soup kitchen in the neighborhood, and so on. 

There are a few reasons for not including a solution in your problem statement. First, you were probably assuming too much about the social problem in question. You will never look at other, better ways to address hunger or bullying, or whatever issue you care about. Lastly, and this is pretty important, many donors will not accept a problem statement like this: "The lack of a soup kitchen in Antioch is a problem." Usually, the simple lack of X or Y is not compelling. You need to show that lots of hungry people in Antioch lack reliable access to other sources of food aid. 

What behaviors are contributing to the problem?

What kinds of behaviors contribute to water pollution or bullying and how much does each of those behaviors really add to the problem. When you back up and think at that level, you automatically open to other behaviors that contribute to the problem. The next section walks you through a short process of thinking about the behaviors that contribute to a problem.

What is the magnitude of each behavior?

In this case, 'magnitude' is just a label for the frequency of a behavior and the impact each time i occurs. Try to assign a number from 1 to 10 for each Impact based on how common the behavior is and how much effect it has each time. You will be using those numbers shortly. 

Bullying serves as a good example of how to assign these magnitude numbers. Calling a kid a ‘retard’ might be a 1 where three kids beating another kid so he has to go the hospital might be an 9. Texting demands that a teenager kill herself might be a 7 or 8. You can use official statistics or even your own experience to assign a frequency to each bullying behavior. Encouraging people to commit suicide is probably far, far less common than calling kids 'retard' or 'wetback' or whatnot. 

Have you checked your assumptions?

Your approach to this problem and possible solutions should probably be based on sound assumptions. This might be a good time to stop and check them. Spend five minutes writing down your assumptions that you bring to this problem/challenge?  How long ago were they formed? They may be outdated. Have they been tested against any data? How long ago? If not, they may prove to be wrong. 

Do they hold up to logical scrutiny? Are they free of obvious cognitive biases like cherry-picking, post hoc rationalization, and so on? We often assume something is true because we hope it is.  Do the assumptions apply to all people you might want to reach or only certain subgroups? That’s fine, just identify the groups the assumptions apply to. When you've checked your assumptions, you can go to the next step.

How does each behavior stack up?

Now, go back to each of those behaviors that you might choose to try and influence. For each one rate the following:

·         Ability - having the resources (time, technical expertise, money, connections) you need to realistically address that behavior

·         Interest - How interested in changing is your target audience

·         Magnitude – How often does each behavior happen and how significant is each instance of the behavior?

Use numbers, rating each variable on a 1-10 scale for each behavior.  

Now, create a chart like the following ('Group' and 'Cost' are explained below)

State the Problem	Magnitude	Ability	Interest	Group	Cost
Behavior 1
Behavior 2
Behavior n

Group and Cost:

In rare cases, you will know the cost of treating each person or each instance of a behavior. If you are able to do so, but the cost here. Use money if possible, but you can also list a cost in labor hours: It takes X labor hours to clean up each abandoned house or whatever. If you know it takes an average of $180 per person per week to operate a homeless shelter, then use that. This may take some extra work, but you can get a per-person cost for any program that has a budget. A pantry that serves 3,000 people per year and costs $900,000 to operate, costs $300 per person per year. Use that figure in your calculations. If you do this, you may find that expanding the pantry is not the most efficient way to use that money.

Who exactly are you serving? The ‘Group’ should be on your mind. This is a demographic group, neighborhood, interest group or market segment you want to work with.

Reducing Air Pollution in Nashville:

Let’s consider the problem of air pollution in Nashville. Now, we are not interested in a straightforward problem or a pre-set solution. If the shelter is short of funds or if you’ve decided the solution is more shelter beds, this process will not help. This process is for looking at all dimensions of the city’s air quality problem. 

Here is a table that summarizes about 45 minutes’ thinking about air pollution in Nashville. I’ll go into details about each element below, but the table should be reasonably easy to interpret.

Air Pollution	Magnitude	Ability	Interest	Group	Cost
Grilling outdoors	3	2	2
Using wood in fireplaces	5	8	2
Wood-fired heating systems	8	7	5	landlords	TBD
Driving alone in a car	8	3	8

We’ll assume for the sake of this illustration that I researched the frequency and impact (magnitude) of each behavior. That’s where the numbers come from.

The example includes one item that might be unexpected; wood-burning fireplaces contribute quite a bit to air pollution. This realization prompts some brainstorming. How can we influence this romantic, yet dirty, activity? This prompts one of the staff to suggest a partnership with a company that sells gas inserts that look good but burn cleaner natural gas. Could you team up with a company like that to promote gas-burning fireplaces?

That discovery prompts a new line of research into a campaign for gas fireplaces. A hundred gas fireplaces newly installed are about the same as removing 50 cars from Nashville roads. That’s how much the city’s production of air pollution would drop if 100 households use gas fireplaces instead of wood.

Maybe this investigation reveals another unexpected fact: 5% of homes in the city use wood-burning furnaces for heat. Many of those homes are in older apartment buildings that often have old and inefficient boilers and poor insulation. Is there more benefit to be gained by doing something about that? ‘How’ comes a bit later. For now, it is enough to know that wood-burning furnaces or boilers are a big contributor to air pollution.

Conclusions:

This focusing exercise can help you make better decisions about how to tackle social problems. Try it on a social problem your organization exists to solve. And let me know if this outline helps, doesn’t help, or needs to be better explained. Try this process and see if it changes your thinking about how to tackle an issue.