8 Pillars of Content You’ll Need to Start Your Marketing Online

200 million people now use ad blockers. If you haven’t noticed already, the wild, wild west days of digital marketing are gone. That’s why I created this short guide to help you figure out the 8 pillars of content you’ll need to start your marketing. 

You can no longer expect one email to get you tons of leads.

Or think you can just create a landing page and get some sales.

Today’s companies have to do more than just pay for display ads, or invest in some Facebook campaigns. Customers have more choices online and want to buy from brands they know, love and trust.

But how do you create authentic, meaningful relationships with your customers in this digital space?

With compelling content and honest storytelling.

Why use content for your marketing?

I’ve been involved in content marketing and digital strategy exclusively for the past decade and I’ve seen a lot of changes in the past few years. When I started, not many small companies even had websites and if you did, you were ahead of the curve.

The way we use technology has dramatically changed in recent years, as has the access we have to brands. However, the way we make buying decisions has not.  Today’s customer’s don’t make buying decisions with their ‘brains’ (as much as we’d like to believe we do), today’s consumers make buying decisions with their hearts.

Think about the last time you made a purchase online.

Did you know, love, and most importantly ‘trust’ that brand? Was it from a company that you’ve loved for awhile?

If you are struggling to compete with the larger brands online and find those customers that love what you do even more, then a great content marketing strategy is for you.

While content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, it generates more than three times as many leads (Content Marketing Institute)

Don’t fret, my friends. While some of us live and breath digital content, creating powerful pieces of content marketing doesn’t have to be tough, or costly.

If you only do one thing with your content, make sure you do this: personalize it!

The more personalized and custom your content can be, the stronger bond you’ll grow with your customers. Content is essential to establishing that trust:

82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content. (Demand Metric, 2014)

Creating custom content for your company doesn’t have to be overwhelming, but you might be asking, where do you start?

All business owners should have a content marketing strategy to make sure they get the most out of their content. Those who have a written content marketing strategy are more likely to find content marketing effective for their businesses, have less content-related stress thanks to knowing what they will do and when they’ll do it, and have a clear idea of what their ROI is. To put it simply, if you don’t have a content marketing strategy, you’re writing in the dark.

What holds most business owners back from writing a content marketing plan is feeling overwhelmed by the thought and not knowing how to go about it. Creating a strategy for your content marketing is not as complicated as it seems. Here are the necessary sections your plan needs to embody:

#1 Reasons for Creating Content

Your content marketing plan should include a short list of reasons why you’re creating content in the first place. It sounds simplistic but you’ll be surprised at how much power and focus you get from taking a few seconds to think about WHY you’re doing something. Whenever you feel low on motivation to work on content marketing, read your list of reasons why it’s so important to your business.

#2 Clarify Your Objectives for Content Marketing

After you know why you’re using content marketing, create a new section in your content marketing plan for objectives. Specifically, what do you want to accomplish with content marketing? Do you want greater brand awareness? More leads? Higher customer retention rates? The goals for your content marketing will determine the direction it takes.

#3 What Makes You Unique?

Also, write down what makes you unique. How will you be different from your competitors in your social media usage? This is similar to determining a unique selling point for your business. In fact, what makes you stand out in the social space may be the same as or close to what your unique selling point is.

#4 Which Platforms Will You Use?

A content marketing strategy should have a section that outlines which platforms you will use to spread your content. Include your objectives and plans for successful engagement for each platform. Because every social media site has its own culture and methods that work, you need to address that for each subsection. Your approach should be catered to each platform and clearly defined so that you can easily find your voice when marketing your content.

#5 Determine How You Will Measure Success

Next, you must write down how you will measure your content marketing success. Determine what metrics you will monitor and how you will collect the necessary data. The metrics you choose as indicators of your content marketing success will be based on your objectives. For example, if you want more leads, a metric to look at is clickthroughs. There are many social media analytics tools available, so research relevant tools and write down which you will use to monitor your content marketing progress.

#6 Target Audience Research

Another crucial section in your content marketing plan is the target audience. Provide a thorough explanation of who your target audience is, what they need, what their pain points are, where they can be found, etc. Writing down the most important information about your target audience will help you consistently deliver the right message with the right approach. A way to make this even easier is to create a persona, so that you’re talking to one person every time you market your content.

8 Pillars of Content for Your Marketing: Here’s Where to Start

That’s why I compiled this ‘starter guide’ for you here. These are the 8 pieces of content I think every social impact business needs to have to grow online and most importantly, to connect with those loyal fans, who will not only love what you do but will tell others about your company too.

1 – About Us Page

If someone wants to quickly get to know your brand, the first place they are going to go is your about us page.

There are many benefits to creating a compelling about us page but one of the main benefits is that people just want to buy from people that they know. If you are a newer brand and you’re trying to compete online with the bigger brands that everybody knows and the bigger stories that everyone knows you’re going to have to have an about us page that really speaks to the worldview and beliefs of your target audience. You are going to have to tell your story in a compelling way!

When we launched our signature program Captivate, we noticed that we suddenly started to get more views on our story page then we had previously. That’s because when people are making a buying decision they need to know more about you. If you’re About Us page doesn’t reflect your mission, beliefs, and values then you need to take a look at a refresh. Of course, it’s important to have your origin or founder story here as well.

You started your mission-driven business for a reason. Tell people why. Tell people about that moment that you knew you couldn’t do anything else but this business. Your customers want to know those details.

An effective About Us page:

  • Tells the story of why you started the business

  • Talks directly to your core customer

  • Shows the impact model and tells your impact story

  • Puts a human face to your business

  • Can also showcase your impact story, have visuals, videos that you don’t want to clutter your homepage

2 – Your Impact Story: Yes, It Matters!

While you might have taken the time to tell your impact story in your about us page, I wanted to highlight this story because it’s so vital to us social impact entrepreneurs, yet many of us really struggle to clarify exactly what our mission is.

Coming up with a mission statement is great. It’s always a great exercise to go through, but I want you to take a step back and consider your personal ‘why’ for starting your company.

Once you’ve tapped into that ‘why’ — the very reason you wake up in the morning, think about the people you serve.

That’s your impact story!

If you are not telling your impact story at every touchpoint online, you are missing out on so many opportunities to grow.

This year, Adam and I went to The Buy Good. Feel Good. Expo in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was a great event to meet our social impact ‘peeps’ and talk directly to the brands we’ve worked with and interviewed, like Christal Earle of Brave Soles.

When we first interviewed Christal, we were immediately drawn to her story, which she tells with such ease and authenticity. Her company started because she wanted to save her adopted daughter’s life in the Dominican Republic. While on a luxury vacation there many years ago, she woke up to the real poverty that she was surrounded by and knew she had to do something about it. That powerful narrative that Christal shares about her ‘why’ for starting Brave Soles is the reason why she’s grown this company so quickly.

When we met up with her in Toronto, she told me that she still gets a kick when people she’s never met before tell her story back to her! Think about that! Her customers and loyal fans are sharing her story with others. That’s the kind of marketing any of us want.

Telling your impact story doesn’t have to be complicated. Think about that personal ‘why’ — the reason you started your company in the first place. Start there. Tell that small part of your story first. See if others can remember that and share it too! The more you tell your story, the more you’ll see what resonates as well. How do you know you’re telling your story enough? You’ll feel like you’re becoming repetitive. That’s when you know you’ve hit that sweet spot.

3 – Videos

Demand for video content increases every day as we become more attached to our electronics. Brands that don’t get themselves out on video are missing out.

Whether you are creating videos for your homepage, to accompany a blog article, or to do some Facebook marketing, videos are a great way to tell your story and talk about your company.

If you haven’t noticed already, videos pop up first in the Google searches. This is not only because YouTube and Google are the same company, but because more of us use videos to make important decisions online, to learn more about a product, or even the impact the company has.

A high-quality video with some serious production value would be nice, but you don’t have to start there. If you are a new company, you can invest in a few key videos that really tell your founder and impact story and start from there.

Of course, video does include things such as Facebook live, which anyone can do. If you are building a community online, going live and sharing some valuable insights, stories, updates about your brand is great too.

4 – Social Media Posts That Speak Directly to Your Audience

A brand today cannot thrive without social media. Whether you want to dominate Instagram or take over Facebook, you are going to have to plan on creating some powerful social media posts that attract the right audience.

We still love our social media. Every minute of the day:

  • Snapchat users share 527,760 photos

  • More than 120 professionals join LinkedIn

  • Users watch 4,146,600 YouTube videos

  • 456,000 tweets are sent on Twitter

  • Instagram users post 46,740 photos

That’s a lot of content creation!

If you want people to share something from your brand, you are going to have to get on social media and you are going to have to figure out those messages that speak directly to them.

Here at Change Creator, we’ve experimented with a lot of messages and memes on Facebook to see what truly resonates with our audience.

Currently, we’ve got a few memes that seem to connect really well with our audience, but we didn’t discover them by accident. For years, we’ve been talking to our audience. Interviewing people over Skype, asking people questions and tracking their responses. We also keep a close eye on who is liking our content, who signs up for our emails, who signs up for our masterclasses. We reach out and talk to as many people as we can, then we find common beliefs, values that thread these conversations.

From there, we can extract those messaging statements that speak directly to our core audience. Right now, you might have seen one of these messages, where we simply ask, “What kind of a difference do you want to make?”

When creating pieces of content for your social media, you want to get inside your audience’s hearts and minds and share content that they’ll want to share as well. Memes, videos, testimonials… these are all great pieces of content to share and promote inside your social media channels.

5 – Get Out There: Be Featured on Others Interviews

People not only want to know your story, but they also want to get to know you, that’s why interviews are so great. As you grow your company, you also need to think about growing your authority online and interviews are an effective way to do that.

If you think that you can’t get featured on interviews, think again. Today, there are more and more niche podcasts out there that are always looking for experts like you. You have a story to share, business lessons to impart, an area of expertise too — you should share it.

While podcast interviews might not naturally come into your email inbox, there are some things that you can do to get featured on other podcasts right away:

  • Tell people you want to be interviewed (yes, this works!)

  • Use HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and answer relevant calls for experts

  • Create compelling content on niche topics

  • Have a ‘want to interview’ me call to action button on your about us page

Getting yourself out there means connecting not only with your audience but other experts in your space too. Immerse yourself in your ‘world’ online. Join Facebook groups that are relevant, ask questions, share your story. Show people that you are the expert and that they will want to know more. The more you can get your story out there, the more people will naturally want to know more!

6 – Failure Stories

I’ve included this valuable piece of content as one every social entrepreneur should consider using in their marketing. Why? Let me explain.

Gone are the days when we just loved brands because they were on television or in a billboard high above the city center. Today’s consumers are inundated with choices. We can either choose a brand that we know or we might discover a new brand — but not so fast. Before we choose to purchase from a new brand, we have to get to know them a little first.

Failure stories are the comfort food of content marketing because we as an audience can’t get enough. Readers have told me over and over again that they love the stories that we tell here at Change Creator, but they really respond to the ‘failure stories’, or stories from us or others that tell what it’s really like on the front lines of your business in the early days. We as audience members can’t get enough — this content is what builds authentic relationships with your audience.

Failure stories lead to breakthrough or transformation stories which everybody loves. A great example of failure stories and transformation stories is any kind of shows such as American Idol or The Voice. The contestants that seem to get the most airplay the most airtime are the ones that are willing to expose the tough times in their lives and the failures they’ve overcome. This draws us in as audience members into their story, and we root for them along the way as we witness their live transformations.

Your brand and your story can be as transformative as any three minutes segment on a reality show if you were willing to expose your ‘teachable’ moments and talk about the lessons that you’ve learned along the way.

One of the quickest ways to build authenticity into your content marketing is to be frank, honest and vulnerable and failure stories are a great way to get there. Failure stories lead to transformational lessons, so don’t be afraid to tell people the times you’ve learned the hard way.

7 –  High-Quality Longform Guides

Curating valuable information is just as important to users today as creating new information. I have clients that make lots of money just helping people make better buying decisions and guides can be a great way to help your customers do that.

In the social impact space, there are so many ‘guides’ and how to articles that you can create to not only help your customers make smarter buying choices but you can also help push the narrative about the causes you champion.

Before you think about the guides you want to create, think about what you want your customers to know. Are you in the vegan fashion space? What about a guide to choosing alternative fabrics? Or a guide to where your clothes come from? There are so many ways you can help guide your consumers to a better purchase, showcase your impact model and build trust. Guides can also be great ‘free gifts’ to help build an email list too!

8 — Personalized Emails

For every $1 spent, email gives back a whopping $38 in ROI and offers the broadest reach (CampaignMonitor) which means if you haven’t already invested in an email strategy, now is the time that you should.

But investing in an email strategy doesn’t mean you have to grow your numbers to tens of thousands… you just have to make sure the right people go to your list. Before you even begin crafting emails, I want you to think about the types of ‘free offers’ you have to get people to that list and answer this question:

Are you giving people what you promised?

If you collect emails with a promise of ‘weekly updates’, then guess what? You better give them weekly updates.

If you collect emails with a promise of the latest news from your industry… you better be updating them on the latest news.

Whatever you promise your audience, make sure you can deliver.

That’s the first step in building that custom content that only you can offer. The next step is crafting those personalized emails that really speak to your customers.

Of course, you can personalize an email with someone’s name, but I want you to think beyond that. I want you to speak to your customers as they were your friends. How can you help them? What are their unique challenges? Fears?

Every person on your email list is a gift.

When crafting your emails, think about how you can help the person you are writing to. Tell stories. Make them smile. Anticipate their needs ahead of your own.

Does this sound like a relationship? Guess what? It is.

Your personal relationship with every member of your audience is important. Emails can be a great way to do that.

Ready to start creating some content? My Final Thoughts

Creating compelling content starts with you. With you sharing your story, talking about your impact and finding those people who will love you and share your story for you. I hope these 8 pillars of content serve you well as you grow your impact business, they sure have helped us a lot around here.

If you are struggling with your marketing, think about the content you are putting out into the world. There are a lot of choices out there. There are brands that are larger, more trusted by consumers but that doesn’t mean you can’t break through, because you can! Think about content that is evergreen, that will last forever so people will always be able to learn from you. Don’t ever underestimate the power strong, timeless content is for marketing. 

Authentic content and storytelling is the fastest, most effective way to grow your business online. These 8 pieces of pillar content are a great place to start, so get crafting!

More amazing resources for you:

How to Use Video Marketing for Social Impact Communications

How to Make 5K More a Month Easy: Actual Expert Advice!

How to Quickly Write an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

 

How to Build Rapport with Anyone (According to Neuroscience)

Building rapport with anyone is a great skill to use in sales and in life. If you want to learn how to build authentic relationships in business and in life, here are some tips I’ve learned along the way in my life. Let me explain…

Gil was a friend I had the pleasure of working with at a produce distributor during the summer and fall of 2017. He delivered the orders I transcribed from voicemails the night before. I verified the deliveries and we would talk about a girl he was interested in.

It started with him relaying stories of the day’s interaction. I was dissecting the interaction based on what I had learned about what happens in the brain in a relationship and would tell him what to do to generate attraction.

We talked about everything from the value/criteria map to body language and microexpressions. I taught him how to understand this girl he was interested in, and how to express his affection for her in a way she knew was “right”.

It was truly fascinating.

I started using this information everywhere. I started giving people their map back to them, purposely generating attraction. I wasn’t looking for romantic interludes, but I did want to test the application to determine just how broad it would reach. This developmental phase gave birth to my tagline: based in science, works like magic.

Here’s what I learned.

As humans, we have a basic need for love. We need to love and be loved. Because we also have a basic need for security, we seek that love in the safest place – the familiar. This search for familiarity is the prism through which we see the world. In other words, we like people like us.

We all have our own set of values, and we assign our own criteria that tell us when those values are validated. When the criteria are met, the value is validated and the connection with the other person is deepened. It can’t not happen. (We can blame that on oxytocin – the hormone responsible for feelings of bonding between a parent and child.)

Person A is in a relationship with person B. Both people have the value of respect. They both want respect in the relationship.

Person A says, “I know you respect me when you tell me the truth, regardless of how it will make me feel.”

Person B says, “I know you respect me when you tell me things carefully and take how I feel into consideration first.”

Now, what’s going to happen when these two start respecting each other based on their own map?

What about if they respected each other based on their partner’s map?

These two options can produce very different outcomes.

Before the conversation can even begin, there must be enough trust (read the feeling of security) to engage the other person. Again, we search for the familiar. And because we are primarily visual in nature, mirror neurons, microexpressions, and body language all play a huge role in how comfortable we are with the interaction.

Bringing it into business: What does this all mean for sales?

There’s a motto in sales that nearly every professional knows by heart – people buy from those they know, like and trust. Here’s the “dirty little secret”: we know, like and trust those most like ourselves.

In order to change the relationship from prospect to a brand ambassador, your potential customer must feel like you tailored the experience just for them because you share the same values. Here’s your checklist to build the kind of rapport to make that happen:

Step 1. Mindset: Getting to Know Your Customers

I haven’t fully discussed the importance of mindset in this article, however, I will say it is an integral part of the prospective interaction. We must have the end goal of not just understanding the person, but understanding them well enough to create an amazing customer experience. Interacting with your prospective customers with this mindset will dramatically improve your responses.

Think about every person that your business interacts with as your best friend. That’s it. When you think about them as your best friend, it changes the way you feel about them, the way you talk to them and most importantly, the feelings of trust and likeability you generate in them.

Step 2. Physiology: Body Language Matters

Experts say communication is 93% non-verbal. This gives us a critical advantage for rapport building by allowing us to use our physiology to communicate openness long before a “how can I help you” appears.

Every person says “hi” with their eyebrows when they see someone they like. It’s subconscious, happens in a flash and occasionally accompanied by a smile. When we see someone we like and know, that brow raise can turn to a full-on head nod. Because this greeting is more instinctual, seeing it naturally induces feelings of trust. The paleo-cortex says this person is friendly, and friendly is good.

Our body language also reveals how we feel, regardless of what we say. Understanding body language gives a remarkable insight into how a person really feels, but what’s more remarkable is that we can use body language to influence how a person feels.

We can create trust and likeability with an open posture, palms out, genuine Duchenne smiles, and so forth, but the sense of knowing comes from mirroring the prospect’s gestures. Brian Tracy talks about this in his award-winning sales course. Gesture mirroring is exactly what it sounds like – giving the prospect’s mannerisms back to them within one to three seconds after it is displayed. This technique is most effective with smaller expressions, such as head tilts or blinking. Gesture hijacking, however, is used when giving back larger expressions like hand movements, and done some time after the prospect uses the gesture.

I used gesture mirroring while conducting one particular test – meeting a representative for the local chamber of commerce. When I got up to leave after our fifteen-minute conversation, she stood up as well and reached out for a hug.

Gesture mirroring and hijacking is so effective because our gestures are generally expressed unconsciously. They are literal physical expressions of our emotional attachment to the subject of discussion. Because they are expressed unconsciously, they are received unconsciously. Because they are received unconsciously, they create immediate rapport.

Step 3. Effective People Reading

Reading people seems more like a mentalist trick than it does science, however, there’s a great deal of research that goes into effective people reading.

Dr. Paul Ekman pioneered the work on microexpressions – nuanced ticks that indicate emotional response or stress. They relay messages to our subconscious in fractions of a second, under the radar of awareness, and directly impact how we feel about the interaction.

Dr. Ekman studied the facial expressions of people from all over the world to find the common facial indicators of emotion, regardless of age, gender or socioeconomic background. He found seven emotions that trigger universal facial expressions – anger, fear, disgust, contempt, sadness, surprise and joy.

These universal expressions reveal thoughts and emotions that otherwise may go unnoticed.

Dr. Lillian Pearl Bridges teaches face reading in Chinese medicine, and her work has been used by countless professionals, from health practitioners to C-level executives. She’s produced an incredibly revealing chart of where emotions are expressed in the face, the types of emotions that are expressed repeatedly and what those wrinkles reveal about a person’s disposition.

From these two experts, we gain a wealth of information about how to deal with a particular individual. Lines on the chin can reveal fear or anxiety, that person may need reassurance about product performance or service guarantee. Vertical lines in front of the ear indicate hypervigilance, this person may need more specifics about a product. A person with the corners of their mouth turned down has experienced disappointment. They might need you to undersell and over-deliver.

Reading and reciprocating expressions are phenomenally powerful ways of building rapport, and because they are nonverbal, there is no critical factor to dissect the reciprocation. We simply feel this person is like us.

Step 4: Speaking: It Matters How You Say it Too

Both verbal and tonal communication can be used to build rapport. The way a person speaks can be indicative of a thought process, but also show the emotion attached. For example, a higher pitch or faster rate of speech can show emotional stress, whereas a lower pitch and slower rate can reveal a calm demeanor and more analytical or critical thought processes.

Verbiage, however, remains one of the most powerful tools for rapport building. It is through words we express our values and desires, and more importantly, how we know those values are validated.

In the example above, both parties had the value of respect, but their criteria for respect was different. Just like that example above, we seldom meet another’s criteria with our own map. In order for a relationship to be built, we must validate their values and do so by their criteria. Verbiage is the tool to use.

A very popular method of communication called reflective listening came out several years ago, and while it does have some efficacy, a tool developed by David Snyder is far more useful. It’s known as the echo technique and is simply giving a person their own words back in the exact order and sequence they came out. Much like body language, it bypasses critical faculties and speaks directly to the emotional part of the brain.

Likeability is where sales are supercharged and experiences are perfected. When a person describes an expectation, desire or passion, they feel a particular emotion and use very particular words. Those words are the keys to those emotions, and the person cannot hear those words about that expectation, desire or passion and not feel that emotion. What’s more fascinating is whatever or whoever a person is looking at when describing that expectation/desire/passion thing gets the emotion transferred to it like an anchor. Eliciting these emotions builds deep rapport by driving likeability through the roof.

Final Thoughts

As humans, we tend to overcomplicate the simplest things. Building rapport and business relationships aren’t difficult. People are looking for themselves and their own values reflected back to them. If we can, through the relationships, services, and products we offer gives those values back in a way the customer feels understood and appreciated, we will build trust and the subsequent loyalty that grows our business.

If you want more organic growth, better reviews, more referrals, and more, then build a relationship with your customers. Customer relationships built on deep rapport will flourish because they know you understand, appreciate and value them individually, and you can meet their business needs better than the competition.

You might also enjoy:

5 Expert Lessons From Dale Partridge For Turning Your Passion Into a Successful Business

Strategies For Building an Authentic and Lucrative Business with Michelle Ward (interview)

9 Proven Signs That You’re Ready to Start Your Own Business

How Edovo Is Overcoming Huge Startup Obstacles to Educate The Incarcerated

brian hill edovo, change creator

Listen to our full interview with Edovo founder, Brian Hill, here

For entrepreneurs looking to create a positive influence in the social impact space, finding ways to work with neglected and abandoned sectors of the population is never easy, though certainly a necessity. Brian Hill, the CEO and founder of Edovo, has been working for the past five years in helping to disrupt the prison industry through finding innovative solutions to bring educational content to the over 12 million people who cycle through the prison industry each and every year.

What is wrong with the Prison Industry?

The United States incarceration is rate is easily the highest in the world with 716 people per 100,000 residents incarcerated. For comparison´s sake, the United States holds about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, yet it houses 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. While there are structural problems and underlying issues related to why certain sectors of the population are incarcerated, the prison population suffers a number of challenges once they find themselves within correctional institutions.

According to Edovo, access to education has the ability to decrease recidivism (repeat incarceration) by 43 percent. Unfortunately, shrinking budgets, stricter security controls, and other structural factors mean that most incarcerated individuals simply don’t have access to meaningful educational opportunities and communication with their support network to successfully navigate the path towards successful reinsertion into society.

Furthermore, both private and public prisons suffer from ineffective incentives. In the case of private prisons which represent about 6-8 percent of the total incarcerated population, unhealthy contracts operating in a for-profit model disincentive prisons from taking a proactive approach to helping incarcerated individuals find ways to get their lives back on track. Similarly, public prisons are often an important source of jobs for rural areas leading elected officials to prioritize a steady source of jobs for their constituencies rather than policies and approaches to help incarcerated individuals successfully rehabilitate.

What is Edovo Doing to Disrupt the Prison Industry?

Following from this bleak reality of the prison industry, Edovo´s mission is to help everyone connected to incarceration build better lives. Specifically, they work with prison institutions and facilities to help them provide meaningful rehabilitative programming and affordable communication strategies to the prison population. They have developed a secure tablet technology that is able to deliver free access to educational programming and low-cost communication services. Not only are incarcerated individuals able to find important educational services, vocational training, and cultural content to fill their days and help them plan for a post-incarceration future, but Edovo also provides educational opportunities for cognitive therapy, PTSD issues and other behavioral issues such as anger management.

Their strategy also helps incarcerated individuals to maintain a connection with their support network through improved and more affordable communication services. The benefits of Edovo´s work are multifaceted, including reduced recidivism rates, increased safety in correctional environments, and increased opportunities for rehabilitation.

According to Brian Hill, the prison industry is a significant and large sector of our country´s population, but very few people (and even fewer people in the business world) have been able to tackle the issues that affect millions of people in the prison industry. “There is a reality of having nothing to do that is hard to comprehend,” Brian relates. “There is so much talent and opportunity within the correctional facilities that is untapped.”

When Brian and the Edovo team first began visiting prisons to come up with ideas of how to introduce meaningful educational content, he found the majority of incarcerated individuals spending the majority of their days watching daytime television. “When you see 9,000 guys watching Jerry Springer, you have to ask yourself what we are doing. This doesn’t make sense for anybody.”

Brian believes that “one of the fundamental flaws of the prison system is that we don’t know why we incarcerate people…Is it for safety, punishment or for rehabilitation?” Knowing that answer can help to drive better outcomes. While the prison industry and the reality that incarcerated individuals live through on a daily basis is an extremely complex issue, Brian decided not to settle for simple answers, but to deal with those complexities while navigating the company´s mission to bring meaningful educational opportunities and content to people in the prison industry.

Changing Strategies for Effective Work

When Edovo first began thinking about how to bring educational opportunities to incarcerated individuals, they originally planned on utilizing the existing television sets within prisons and transitioning from low-quality daytime TV to educational programming. The organization quickly learned, however, that incarcerated people would not interact with educational TV programs, but rather needed personalized educational content.

In order to deliver educational content, then, Edovo has had to transform into a multifaceted company. “Today we are an educational content creator and curator, a software developer, we install wireless networks in prisons, develop secure tablets, and we are a communications provider, as well as working as a consultant organization,” Brian mentions. “In order to operate in the prison, we had to do all of that.”

“As an entrepreneur, you need to realize that you´re not right most of the time. You have to expect that you´ll be wrong,” Brian mentions. “It is important to listen to the dynamics of the market and be married to the outcomes.”

Edovo realized that one of the biggest challenges they faced towards their goal of making educational content viable and accessible to prison populations was the ability to allow incarcerated individuals to gain access to technologies where they could find personalized educational content. They worked on developing a minimum viable product that could be sent into jails and focused on developing tablet technology. Once they sold that vision to local sheriff departments, they had to figure out how to make technology conform to prison security protocols.

While they were first laughed out of the room by people who had worked in jails before and understood the challenges, they were optimistic and believed in what they had to offer. “You can’t fake genuine,” Brian says. “We truly believed we could change the dynamic of the market.” Their passion and authenticity not only allowed them to introduce innovative solutions to one of the most difficult to reach populations, but it also played into their funding arrangements. Because almost no investors understand the dynamics of the prison industry, they had to educate investors and create trust. Brian believes that they were able to gain an enormous amount of funding because while “lots of people complain (about the problems in the prison industry), very few people come with solutions that have sustainable and scalable merit.”

Since their first launching of educational tablets into prisons in 2014, they have reached over 100,000 incarcerated people and are currently doubling year by year.

According to Brian, “the problem you have to solve, is not the problem you thought would be there. We wanted to make education available for people incarcerated but the biggest problem was payment and procurement to government agencies.”

He goes on to say that’s “if you would’ve told me that making education possible for jails was through buying a phone company…I wouldn´t have believed you.” Edovo´s experience has taught them prison communications contracts are key for criminal justice reform, and they are intent on proving the merit of that strategy.

Listen to our full interview with Edovo founder, Brian Hill, here

A Few Key Takeaways

  1. Stay married to the outcome: Entrepreneurs should understand that there is tremendous complexity that comes with working in the social impact space. Instead of settling for simple answers to hard questions, it is important to embrace that complexity and think modularly when developing solutions. “Don’t try to solve it all, or you will fail,” Brian mentions. Rather, focus on creating scalable but modular change that’s will allow future actors and impact companies to tackle the next layer of complexity.
  2. Educate Investors: When working with marginalized populations or obscure issues, you may need to educate investors to prove to them the worth of the strategy you are proposing. Showing your genuine passion for the work you are doing is a great way to build trust with funders.
  3. Don´t get stuck on one solution: Rather, be open to finding new problems/issues than the ones you set out to originally “solve”. Flexibility will allow you to respond truthfully to the issues that you encounter.

Creating a Lean Business Plan For Social Impact: Eric Ries & Ann Mei Chang

change creator eric ries and ann mei chang

Listen to our full interview with Ann Mei Change and Eric Ries here

The road to profits is littered with good objectives. All you need to do to launch a firecracker startup is talk to a focus group and run a few field trials. Business management is easy. Udemy and Inc.com will teach you how in five amazing steps you won’t believe are true…

… until that first fatal setback that shows you why 75% of start-ups fail: there are no maps for unexplored landscapes or demographic data for invented needs. You can read industry forecasts all year and still not hit on a single piece of actionable information for walking on unknown terrain.

That’s why Eric Ries’ Wikipedia page begins with failure.

A Yale education and an intellect sharp enough to cut diamonds with couldn’t save him. Conventional best practices simply didn’t work.

When failure comes to ordinary entrepreneurs, they blame their business plan. They blame their sales teams. They blame everything they can find in their dated textbooks, but Eric Ries decided to develop a new way of thinking instead. That new way is The Lean Startup and millions of white-collar acolytes are filling up convention centers, business pages, and forums to learn more about it. The lean approach is no longer a simple philosophy, but a movement that’s crowded onto every continent in the world.

Issue #23 of Change Creator Magazine presents a unique cover with both Ann Mei Chang and Eric Ries

Uncertainty in an Unpredictable World

Eric Ries is the reason concepts like minimum viable products, pivots, and feedback loops are so pronounced in today’s thinking. His tools help for-profit startups to develop products in high-uncertainty environments by pushing production further down the innovation cycle and drawing learning forward.

Think of the lean approach as the tour guide to your customers’ interests. Instead of giving you a half-considered map and sending you on your way, it stays by your side, helping you adjust to your terrain with every step. It’s transformed for-profit thinking, and now it’s moving into the social impact space, largely thanks to Ann Mei Chang and her book, Lean Impact. Even the private world’s uncertainty cannot compete with that of the social sector, so Chang believes it should stop executing plans as if it knows the answers.

A Dirty Word Called “Funding”

How do you save an endangered species?

We might have a hundred solutions, but the last northern white rhino and shrinking rainforests indicate that they aren’t working. How do you stall global warming?

The 2030 UN deadline for effective change tells us we still don’t have a bold enough plan to save the pale blue dot. How do you close the wealth gap, cure poverty, and mobilize a nation? Every one of these issues has several defined strategies, but few can account for the system that prevents social entrepreneurs from implementing them. Ann wanted to change that, so she spoke to change creators who had already beaten their way through the underbrush.

“The most common [challenge] that came up is the nature of funding. You have to come up with a detailed plan in advance and often plan down to the penny exactly. Some of the saddest stories I’ve heard are of organizations who have come up with these plans, been awarded grants [and then] discovered that what they were doing didn’t work and then kept doing it anyway because they had a contract to do.” The social sector is jerry-rigged to force change creators to map out in five and 10-year milestones with absolute certainty. It’s an impossible ask and, to muddy the pathways even more, demand and impact are intertwined.

Lean impact has cleared the trail. It might not be able to create your map, but it provides the cartography lessons you need to sketch it yourself.

Finding Certainty in High-Risk Biomes

In the business world, demand is easy to understand: you build a product. Your customers either buy it or ignore it. Feedback happens all on its own, but the social impact space doesn’t come with such a measurable response. To stretch the feedback loop even further, change creation comes with its own inbuilt well of compliments. “We’re dedicating our money and our lives to trying to do something to help others,” Ann says, “and somehow that stymies people into asking, ‘Could you do better?’”

While writing Lean Impact, Chang uncovered the story of Summit Public Schools, an emblem of how nonprofits can put the lean approach to work. Founder, Dianne Tavenner, wanted to have 100% of her students graduate, so she launched a few schools and watched her first students graduate with better results than those of their peers. Summit Schools were encouraged to scale prematurely, but Tavenner wanted to push her organization into a shortened feedback loop. “They figured out a way to gather more subjective data through focus groups and teacher evaluations, and then experiment by running variations of their classrooms over a year-long period and look at the results on a week-by-week basis.” In so doing, Summit turned its cause into a minimum viable product. Every tiny change was measured, all the way down to its classroom layouts.

In 2017, 99% of its graduating class was accepted into college, and 300 U.S. schools are replicating their model.

Chang sees that iterative approach as a way to escape the funding/contract mill. “If you’re trying to reduce the incidence of malaria in a region by distributing mosquito nets, it may take years to measure whether the incidence of malaria has gone down, but tomorrow you can test whether people are actually hanging up those nets and sleeping under them, and if they’re not, you can figure out quickly it’s not likely to work.”

The traditional Theory of Change defines a goal, maps its fulfilment, and then looks back to uncover the preconditions required to affect that change. The concept has worked its way into common lexicon, but Ann Mei has found that nonprofits are developing elaborate theories for the sake of obtaining funding, then abandoning their research on a dusty shelf. “Test those early linkages. If you think if you teach kids this way, they’ll learn better, test whether they’ve retained the information better using whatever indicators you can find, and optimize for that.”

Entrepreneurship will swallow you in for-profit thinking before you have a chance to measure your real impact, so shortened feedback loops are not options, but necessities. “We want to identify our riskiest assumptions–the hypotheses that we need to test early on that may cause our solution to fail.

Eric Ries is a passionate advocate of the scientific method for this precise reason. “In engineering-driven organizations, in science-driven organizations, even a lot of finance-driven organizations, the idea of rigorous analysis of day-to-day decision-making is considered essential, and yet that doesn’t get integrated into boardroom conversations. I think in the future people are going to look back on our era and find that really strange.”

Empathy in the For-Profit Impact Space

Social entrepreneurs must serve two audiences to the private sector’s single credit-card-wielding buyer: the consumer and the cause. The latter cannot be left to fail for long enough to gather quantitative feedback.

“Measuring impact is much more difficult than measuring clicks on an e-commerce site,” Chang says, but perhaps the most resounding reason she supports the lean approach is the need for empathy in a socially-driven industry. “When you’re experimenting in situations where you’re working with vulnerable populations, it has to be more thoughtful,” she says. “If you’re seeking social impact, it’s not enough to have people want what you have. You also need to deliver a social benefit.”

Thankfully, a social benefit can be measured qualitatively long before numbers can be crunched.

Drowning in Data

The private sector has begun to emphasize the importance of small data in a big-data-obsessed world — those actionable data footprints consumers leave behind as they navigate your brand. Without small data, businesses would drown in their own numbers–and they often do. Eric Ries expands on that thought process through vanity metrics, his term for the analytics businesses use to lionize unproven success and intimidate their rivals.

“I was once up against a competitor who liked to report the total GDP equivalent of all the user-to-user virtual transactions in their system,” he says. Those metrics are easy to celebrate…all the way to failure. “There’s no way to ever pivot because people will constantly say, ‘We’re almost on the right track. The numbers will turn around any minute,’ and by the time you finally realize that things are a disaster, it’s too late to change.”

Ann says the social sector has taken vanity metrics to an entirely new level. “Almost all [nonprofits] tout the number of people they’ve touched in some way. These numbers are completely meaningless. They largely mean that someone was good at fund-raising; that they wrote a good grant, someone gave them a bunch of money and so they did stuff for a bunch of people. It doesn’t actually say whether they made those people’s lives better.”

Big data disfigures the real and critical things that are getting in the way of your success. You’ll never discover why those youth you found employment for lost their jobs months later. You’ll never notice that one demographic who are not being served as well as the rest. You’ll look at the beautiful sunset from 93 million miles away and never notice that the sun is dying. “When you pay attention to the real data behind the metrics that matter,” says Ann, “you’ll make different decisions about how you deliver your intervention. ‘

Redefining Risk

Beyond Chang’s study of Summit, her research led her right back to a company belonging to Ries himself: The Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE). The startup is hoping to overhaul the stock exchange to relieve public companies of the pressures involved in high-frequency trading. The concept is almost too wild to imagine, and yet it’s attracted the encouragement of giants like Tim O’Reilly, Aneesha Chopra, and Marc Andreessen. It is, Ries says, “making it possible to run organizations in a more sustainable, innovative, long-term ethical way.”

“I think that a high percentage of the work that needs to be done in the economy today needs to be done by startup-type teams,” he explains. Startups are nimble. They’re innovative. They can become financially self-sustaining, and few brands characterize those traits as well as LTSE.

There’s a reason Eric has become part of such a seemingly-risky side of entrepreneurial culture: he believes startups have the courage to tackle the world’s problems more aggressively by taking the very risks that reduce risk. “[Risk avoidance is] not actually a low-risk way to go. Corporations get disrupted precisely because they were unwilling to do anything they perceived as risky but that their competitor did not. I think we have to redefine what risk means.“

The problem is often less one of bureaucracy than of simple unwillingness and red tape, and while those tendencies are fizzling away in the sunlight, Chang believes the social impact space’s lack of profit focus is slowing it down. “People are wed to their existing solutions because of pride of ownership, brand identity, or risk aversion, and so the best ideas often don’t get picked up.

Social entrepreneurship is poised to take over the for-profit world, and Ries and Chang are riding the cusp of the wave, using lean startups as their sails. They’ve already changed the global conversation, but if you listen carefully enough, you will change the world.

Listen to our full interview with Ann Mei Change and Eric Ries here

Key Takeaways

  1. Create short feedback loops. Measure your impact on a weekly basis, even if it’s too early to test it quantitatively.
  2. Find the driver that will let you scale and accelerate growth.
  3. Identify those assumptions that could make your solution fail: those related to growth, value, and social benefit.
  4. Don’t drop your knowledge and research once you’ve secured funding. Keep measuring your growth rigorously, never allowing your good intentions get in the way of your ambition for your cause.
  5. If your initial plan doesn’t work, pivot to a new approach that’s more likely to carry you towards your vision.
  6. Vary and study your approach so that your minimum viable product can grow out of smaller milestones. Test your theory of change.
  7. Use the strengths of a startup business model to innovate more aggressively.
  8. Take the risks that reduce your risk.
  9. Don’t be tempted to use vanity metrics. Identify relevant metrics that are capable of picking up the nuances in your cause and its effects.

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