Q&A: An inside look at Facebook's SDG-focused Project17

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The COVID-19 pandemic has led many tech company employees who are now working from home to seek more purpose from their work. “COVID has really amplified people's desire to be of more service, to be part of a community of positive and proactive change in the world,” said Marcy Scott Lynn, director of Global Impact Partnerships at Facebook. Lynn and her team are working to connect their colleagues with ways to make their work aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals, whether through Facebook’s own operations or support of external partners. In March, Facebook publicly announced Project17, the term it had used internally to refer to its work on the SDGs, 17 goals that conclude with Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals. The initiative, which sits under Global Impact Partnerships, grew from a commitment the company made at last year’s United Nations General Assembly to use data to help partners advance progress on the SDGs. Lynn and her team started by exploring the work Facebook was already doing that aligned with the goals, and organized conversations with NGOs to understand how the company might support their work, narrowing in on gender data as the place to start. “ I’m sure you’ve heard, ‘Nothing at Facebook is somebody else’s problem.’ It sounds cliche and very Silicon Valley. But that really is the ethos and our hope is that’s also the ethos with the SDG work.” --— Marcy Scott Lynn, director of Global Impact Partnerships, Facebook Devex caught up with Lynn to discuss how COVID-19 has impacted Project17’s current work and what the initiative plans to prioritize moving forward. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. I first heard about Project17 in September 2019, when you and your colleagues organized a roundtable conversation on gender data on the sidelines of UNGA in New York City. How did that process lead to the public announcement in March? We put together a massive spreadsheet to understand what is the whole body of work happening across the company and how do they map to the different goals. So that’s where we started. Formalizing it really started at that UNGA roundtable, where we really put a formal stake in the ground to say we’re going to invest in this idea of giving organizations the power to advance the SDGs and our first go at this will be through data work. Project17 was how we referred to ourselves internally, but we just hadn’t given it a public name until that point. That UNGA roundtable we did was behind closed doors. It was really a consultation. We made a commitment to the room and to ourselves, but hadn’t really formalized what it meant to have that commitment — and what were we then going to do in service to the commitment? And so in March, we said, “Okay we are actively and proactively working on the SDGs. We made a commitment. We have movement toward meeting that commitment in these ways.” And it sort of put us on the hook publicly in a way we just hadn’t been before. How do you ensure your team does not operate as a separate corporate social responsibility entity, but is integrated with the company? I don’t want to get too deep into our internal organizational eccentricities, but we have a phrase we use at Facebook often called XFN, which stands for cross-functional, which means whatever the org chart is, there’s always a cross-functional group that makes sure to be aligned. Project17 started as this tiger team in partnerships. But really trying to get a lot of people in the company interested and activated gave us that window into the XFN opportunity across the company. We have our own body of work and our own set of partners and we support other work where the SDGs are relevant, either because a team has come to us for consultation on SDG relevance or because we have sought out a team. We started with this data work, for example. We’re working really closely with the Data for Good team, taking a look at the offering they have and trying to put that within an SDG context, then making sure the partners for whom their datasets would be useful can use it. We don’t think it should only live in one team. Our goal is that every team understands the SDGs and how their work ladders up to them. “Initially, when we thought about data, our team’s thought was vertical. So when we first thought about gender data, we thought ‘SDG 5. Nope, it’s horizontal.’ So part of our thinking now is, what else is horizontal?” --— Marcy Scott Lynn, director of Global Impact Partnerships, Facebook We don’t have a CSR team at Facebook. Whether people think we should, that’s a debate for another day, but we don’t. We don’t have central CSR functions. I’ve worked at Facebook a long time, and I came from CSR before Facebook, so I’ve seen the value of having the function, and I’ve really come to see the value of having it distributed around the company. It enables more people to see it as part of their own team mission. I’m sure you’ve heard, “Nothing at Facebook is somebody else’s problem.” It sounds cliche and very Silicon Valley. But that really is the ethos and our hope is that’s also the ethos with the SDG work. What has the impact of COVID-19 been on Project17? On the one hand, it seems your gender data work might be more in demand now that in-person data collection is a challenge. But how does it impact your strategy moving forward? The impact COVID has had on Project17 is not so much, “Okay, we did data, now what?” By working on gender data we learned about the opportunity. We could do only data for the next five years and have plenty to do. COVID has given us pause to think a little bit differently. Initially, when we thought about data, our team’s thought was vertical. So when we first thought about gender data, we thought “SDG 5. Nope, it’s horizontal.” So part of our thinking now is, what else is horizontal? How can we think about these SDGs horizontally? I think the way COVID has shifted our thinking is to ask who are the organizations we need to be working with rather than what is the specific thing we are going to put into the world? We are really trying to think more broadly about who the offering would be for and thinking about the development sector more broadly rather than specific Facebook areas of focus. As we look to 2021, we are thinking about the who more than the what. COVID has really put us in that frame of mind. One of the challenges might have been, might continue to be to a certain extent, the wide-eyed naïveté of our team, in a way. Sometimes there’s our belief in what’s possible, and what we could and should be doing, and then there’s the reality of — getting a dataset through a privacy review is a lot harder.