The Importance of Listening to People you Aim to Serve
“Surgeon General’s Warning: No people were actually asked if their lives were impacted. This label should be on nearly every impact report out there.”
Lindsay Smalling with 60 Decibels and I had a conversation as part of our micro-podcast series about the importance of actually listening to the people you aim to serve. Glad we could meet up at The Global Impact Investing Network Investor Forum in Copenhagen.
Podcast Transcript
Jacob: [00:00:00] I’m here at the Global Impact Investing Networks Impact Forum in Copenhagen. And I’m here with my friend, Lindsey Smalling. And tell me about yourself and what your company does.
Lindsay: So good to be here with you. I love that we originally met through a conference and now here we are at a different conference.
When we met, I was at SOCAP. Now I’m at 60 Decibels, which is an impact measurement company. It’s called 60 Decibels because that’s the average volume of a human conversation.
Jacob: How do you guys go about trying to deliver the impact you’re about?
Lindsay: We really believe that you can’t understand impact without asking the people whose lives you’re intending to impact.
It’s sort of amazing how many social impact reports we feel like there should maybe be like a surgeon general’s warning on there to say, no people were actually asked if their lives have been impacted. Because that extra step, like so much of the impact measurement reporting really stops at the level of operational data or output data.
It’s sort of like, here’s what we did, but [00:01:00] it’s not understanding, did it work? What could be better? And really the way to get that data is just to ask the people, you know, who matter most, the people who are utilizing those products and services. So we have a network of researchers, about a thousand researchers in 70 countries who speak 130 languages.
So we’re using local researchers in local languages, but primarily using phone surveys, so that we can get that scale. And doing projects with companies where we’re talking to a representative sample of their customers, usually like about 300 customers, gets us to 90 percent confidence that what we’re hearing is representative of the larger group.
And through those phone surveys, get a lot of quantitative data, qualitative data, really understanding their own perspective behind the impact they’re experiencing. So we sometimes talk about it as sort of like a Goldilocks approach. It’s like, what’s the least you can do to get the most data, you know, so that this can actually be something that [00:02:00] more companies do is how.
Jacob: does that end up being different than what they have been doing? Like, give me an example.
Lindsay: An example would be that the data they had before is how many microfinance loans were made and how many of them were paid back on time. And maybe some basic demographics on like how many of their clients are women. But they don’t have deeper insights around did they have access to something like this before?
What do they perceive as their alternatives? Has it had an impact on their quality of life? And then , the why behind that? So for a question that is like really well known in the business world and net promoter score, would you recommend this to a family member or friend? A lot of folks collect that.
It’s a sort of quantitative, easy to collect number, but asking that follow up open ended, you think about if you were doing that through an online survey, nobody fills out those big open white boxes. But when you have someone on the [00:03:00] phone and you just say, and why, like why did this improve your quality of life or, why would you recommend it to a family member, a friend. Our team then goes through and codes those responses and pulls out those themes so that the company can really understand what’s driving value, what are the top challenges folks are facing, and that’s all new data for them.
Jacob: And I guess, what do the companies do with that? Or how does that help them improve?
Lindsay: I’ll give you an example. We did work with, an ag tech company in India called Plantix and they’re, what they’re trying to solve for is that a lot of these smallholder farmers. Don’t have a good understanding of like if their crop gets a disease, what is the disease?
What’s the best pesticide to use for that? They may not even have access to those pesticides, whatever their local market is. So they have an app where they can take a picture of the plant and it will tell them, here’s the disease it has. Here’s the recommended use. If you can’t get access to this, here’s some other solutions, et cetera.
And they’ve really made the case to impact investors that the [00:04:00] value of their solution is that it reduces the use of the wrong pesticides and that it has greater crop output for the farmers. So it has increased economic yield. Well, when we asked the farmers what they value most about it. They like that it makes them smarter as a farmer. It helps them know how to do their job better. So it was really the educational value that the farmers saw the greatest benefit from. And so their UX team was like, well, we can put more of that in there. Like we can orient the, you know, the information we provide or I’ll learn more or whatever, to just make sure that if they’re really loving the educational insights, and that was something that was like pretty much a blind spot for them.
Jacob: What does an ideal client look like for 60 decibels?
Lindsay: So our main sectors are energy, agriculture, financial inclusion, um, quality jobs, and then sort of gender cuts across all of that. Um, disability cuts across all of that. A lot of our current clients are actually investors who are hiring us to work with their portfolio companies.
The two things that I always say is one, it [00:05:00] works really well where humans can reliably speak to the impact that they’re experiencing. There are a lot of great impact investments that are in things like alternative protein sources. There’s really no human for us to talk to about the impact of alternative proteins, like the impact there is carbon reduction.
It’s other things. So if the impact is, like where the impact is human lives, and those humans can say, I use this, it had this impact on me, that’s sort of where we’re the best fit. And then we also are most useful where there’s scale. So if you’re serving, like there’s a lot of really amazing groups that I’ve talked to in the U.S. who are working with really marginalized communities, they’re often working with like a hundred individuals at a time and because in the US. our response rates are something like 20 to 25 percent It’s probably not worth hiring us to end up talking to 20 to 25 of your customers You might just want to try to figure out a way to do that yourself But in emerging markets where they’re [00:06:00] dealing with like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of customers to be able to get something within like 12 to 16 weeks, that’s a representative sample of hundreds of their customers.
It’s just like, we really solve that scale problem. Too much of the impact reporting is sort of these, this triangulation to impact. It’s saying like, well, we. made this investment that had this much output and therefore we must be having positive impact in the world. And just that lack of importance of actually asking people if that is their lived experience and what could be better about it.
And so much of the impact reporting is this very like upward spacing. Like I have to report to my investor who has to report to their LPs and is sort of extractive. How can this be more of a power shift to say, First, let’s understand what the customer wants and that can help the company do what they do better that then can help the investor do what they do better.
It’s like more actionable. It’s [00:07:00] driving power down towards the folks who are systemically underserved and just saying their voices need to be a central part of the decision making. Ideally from sort of portfolio design and investment process, like how do we understand the challenges that need to be solved in the terms of the people, you know, articulating their own lived experience, but even in the case where maybe there has been a more top down, we’ve decided this intervention based on this other data, et cetera, at least do that follow up to say, Okay, what worked about it? Where do we still have room to learn and improve?
Jacob: What’s the biggest hurdle you’re faced right now?
Lindsay: The biggest hurdle is still that this isn’t considered the norm. So like, these fund managers are doing pretty good on like, working it into their policy statement and doing these various things. But when it gets to actually understand your outcomes, it’s like 10 percent of the verifications that have been done.
Jacob: What are you most excited about looking forward?
Lindsay: So my [00:08:00] personal sort of baby within 60 decibels is work that we’ve been doing in the United States for the last three years. We’ve really focused on listening to small business owners in the U S.
Particularly understanding the differences in small business owner, their experiences, their access to capital, et cetera, when you segment that by gender, by race. And a lot of these things, we know the dynamics, the way the U. S. has systemic racial and gender biases. But being able to have better data for the groups that are like CDFIs that are really set up to serve those communities.
That’s a whole system of community development financial institutions across the U. S. designed to serve this. And they’re, right now, the only data they report is like the number of loans they made in certain census tracts. That tells them nothing about who are we reaching, what is the impact that there, that is happening from these loans or these products.
How can we better serve folks that are in sort of these financial deserts? And so just bringing what we’ve been able to bring to sort of the [00:09:00] emerging markets impact investing scene to really add more knowledge and insight to our own challenges here in the U. S. is something that I get pretty excited about.
Jacob: Why would an LP, a GP, or a portfolio company choose 60 decibels over other options?
Lindsay: So there is this whole sort of like interconnected web of impact measurement and reporting, and I would say what I love about what we do, like we are not the full solution, but that means that we play really well with most of the other solutions, like the other, the blue mark, like I mentioned, the sort of verification piece there’s a lot of impact reporting platforms like Upmetrix and Novata and Proof.
That are trying to help all these companies take that operational data they’ve been collecting and like, make it into something they can actually share with LPs or use to make internal decision making. So there’s this whole web of things. I think the piece of what we do is that if folks want to get that customer voice, really, there’s no one else [00:10:00] who’s doing it at the scale we’re doing.
And so, like, maybe they’ve already gone through those other layers. They hired a consultant to help them with an impact framework. They’ve made sure they’re aligned to the operating principles. They’ve collected that operational data, but if they’re still feeling like this still, is it really telling us what we want to know.
In other cases I think that folks start with this because maybe it’s their orientation that they really need, like, to a better, maybe it’s a fintech that grew really fast, doesn’t have any impact reporting in house or an impact measurement person or whatever, but they understand the value of customer insights. And then they get this data and it’s the first time they really understood the impact they’re having.
You know, it can take you to sort of the punchline right away, you know so in some ways it can like actually sort of jump the process to say, well, let’s just listen to the people who matter most. And if we’re, you know, why do we need to set up all these frameworks first that are very conceptual? Let’s start with the real data of like what people are saying.
Jacob: Yeah. Love it. Do you think that [00:11:00] some organizations are afraid of asking?
Lindsay: Yeah, we do face that challenge. They control who sees that data. And so it’s sort of a question of like, well, if you’re nervous about what I would say, wouldn’t you rather know it? Before you find out some other way. For example Omidyar Network, we work with their full India portfolio.
And so it’s kind of like a, a gentle requirement across their portfolio to say, We will pay for this study, but we kind of expect you to do it. Even if they perform poorly, Now they know and it really motivates them to like fix whatever that dimension was where they’re a little weaker. So I love the way that like, not just the data, but the data relative to benchmarks.
I think folks really are hungry for that type of comparability against their peers. That data is just for them, but they’re also getting the anonymized aggregated data from everyone else. So they’re sort of like, This way that each project helps the whole get a better sense of like, what is the norm for the sector and what is the range of performance?
Jacob: Oh, brilliant.
Lindsay: Most of our [00:12:00] surveys are built off this base that we call core insights, which is aligned to industry standards around the five dimensions of impact. So who is impacted? What is the impact they experienced? How much, the sort of depth of impact, contribution, what did have happened, but for your product or service, and then risk.
So that’s sort of the recommendation of like, if you’re trying to understand impact, look at those five dimensions.
Jacob: So if somebody wanted to find this, find you online or 60 decibels online, where would they, where would they go?
Lindsay: They would go to 60 and then decibels, D E C I B E L S dot com, which I would recommend because I think we have one of the coolest, most playful, fun sort of brands, and there’s a ton of data on there. We post a lot of our sector level benchmarks, so if folks are curious to just learn more about what does that mean, and we show the companies we’ve worked with, et cetera, who’s in that benchmark.
So there’s just a ton of data there for [00:13:00] consumption. Different reports we’ve done with different folks. So we have a really fun newsletter that’s called The Volume, which is some, our work, but also just like interesting data facts that we find around the internet that our team likes. So lots of different ways to engage.
Jacob: Love it. Thank you so much for sharing.
Lindsay: Thank you, Jacob.
Jacob: Good to catch up.
Lindsay: Yeah.
Jacob: All right. See ya.
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