Similar to William Easterly, an economics professor at New York University, we believe the “lack of feedback is one of the most critical flaws in existing aid.” Organizations need to stay close to the communities they serve in order to constantly receive feedback and be held accountable.
They need to have a “searcher” mentality instead of a “planner” mentality.
So what are the characteristics of searchers and planners? According to Easterly, “planners apply global blueprints; searchers adapt to local conditions. … A searcher admits he does not know the answers in advance. … A searcher only hopes to find answers to individual problems by trial and error experimentation. … Planners believe outsiders know enough to impose solutions.”
More importantly Easterly points out: “Two key elements that make searches work, and the absence of which is fatal to plans, are FEEDBACK and ACCOUNTABILITY. Searchers only know if something works if the people can give feedback. This is why successful searchers have to be close to the customers at the bottom, rather than surveying the world from the top.”
We believe in being accountable and acting on the feedback you’re given by a community. This is what drives an organization to do better.
For us, searching means listening to our community
When we started Turn.io, a company working to help social impact organizations manage and automate conversations to improve lives, we were motivated by the belief that new technologies that increase social impact should be shared, sustainably.
Our community has helped us understand that to have a real impact, we need to change our mentality from planning to searching.
—That’s why we built a behavior change software solution that makes it easy for social impact organizations to build, improve, and scale chat services in real-time using the WhatsApp Business API as it’s a fast, secure, and reliable way for organizations to reach a global audience.
Our aim has always been to inspire people to solve problems but perhaps like many others we had a planner mentality; coming up with a plan and hoping it will fit. We soon realized that was not a good enough solution for the problems our community of social impact organizations was facing.
As teams started to use our low code software platform, two of the most common questions we received were how are other organizations doing it? and can you help me get started? Little did we know it at the time but these two questions would fundamentally shift what we do at Turn.io and how we build our product.
We started thinking about how we could answer these questions and how we could provide more guidance without burdening our tiny product team or shifting from our product-first approach?
Solutions need to be scalable and shareable
To start, we decided to run a monthly town hall meeting where we could introduce interested social impact organizations to what was new with the WhatsApp Business API, what we were up to at Turn.io, and most importantly, how organizations were already using chat services to have an impact.
We also started a WhatsApp group to answer ongoing questions and began to showcase two organizations a month. Each organization shares their problem, their WhatsApp solution, the scale they want to achieve, and the top lessons they learned so far. Organizations have been inspired by the community case studies, but the question still remains: How do we get started?
To address this, we started hosting training sessions and accelerator programs to help teams set up and create content and automation for their services. Our community began to grow but the learning curve was steep and teams still battled when starting with a blank canvas. We were headed in the right direction, but not quite there yet.
Opinion: Why use chat for impact?
Social impact organizations need chat tools that are designed to improve lives, not sell products. Turn.io explains why.
This is when we realized that having an active Community of Practice was like having an always available group to conduct design research with. Every conversation was an opportunity to get feedback to improve our product. More importantly, we were building a product that our Community of Practice could use to gather feedback from the communities they serve too. We were creating ways to make searching easier.
We were honored to have human rights activist and co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Nadia Murad as keynote speaker at the Chat for Impact Summit earlier this year. Taking Murad’s wisdom to heart that the community knows its needs better, we decided to make the community central to what we do. We needed to bring our community and product closer together so we set out to make it easier for organizations to share what works with one another, in ways that accelerate our collective impact.
Our community has helped us understand that to have a real impact, we need to change our mentality from planning to searching and that shift changed how we do business, how we design our product, and how we engage with partners to build a product that helps teams on the ground quickly find their own solutions to have an impact.
How does that impact a product?
Our first iteration on this is the creation of Playbooks, a product feature that allows organizations to view and download reusable chatbot components from the world’s leading social impact organizations. For example, a set of chatbot flows that follow safeguarding best practices was created by community member Isabelle Amazon-Brown in her work with UNICEF. Playbooks are our way of making it simple for organizations to share what works with the broader community.
We’re excited about working with our community to expand a library of ready-to-use Playbooks.
We invite you to join us on this journey and become a part of the Chat for Impact community.
About the authors
Lieze Langford
Lieze Langford is the partnership impact manager lead at Turn.io. She is focused on growth through business development, client success, and brand communications.
Pippa Yeats
Pippa Yeats is a co-founder and product manager at Turn.io. She focuses on designing a product and community that uses chat and behavioral science to drive real-world social impact.
