Two Heads are Better Than One: Sharing Responsibility across private, public, and social sectors

The theme of World Humanitarian Day is One Humanity, Shared Responsibility. The traditional lens to understand this is to think about the way that all of us, regardless of who we are, where we live, and what we do for a living, have a responsibility toward greater humanity. This belief is at the core of most mission-driven non-profits, which single-handedly aim to attack and eradicate many of the challenges of the world, including poverty, access to healthcare, lack of quality education, and climate change. Each organization crafts their theory of change and then relentlessly attacks the problem, aiming to eradicate it by scaling their efforts and bringing passionate employees and dedicated donors into the fold. 

But I'm looking at the theme with a different lens. What if we did not individually tackle the world's problems one person and one organization at a time? What if we actively shared responsibility for tackling those problems with others? There is tremendous potential for the private, public, and social sector to work together to attack the world's greatest problems, each bringing their unique capabilities in order to build a comprehensive, macro-level solution that withstands the test of time, funding, and leadership.

For the past year, I have participated in the Social Impact Immersion Program at BCG, which has been a fascinating and exciting opportunity to work with some of the world's leading non-profits. When working with non-profits, BCG applies the approaches, frameworks, and ideas from the corporate sector into a non-profit setting, with topics as varied as strategy, people & organization, operations, and technology. It has been a terrific opportunity to see ways that the corporate sector (BCG) can amplify the work of the social sector.

For example, working with a major education non-profit, we applied the Finance approach of measuring ROI (return on investment) to help the client measure the effectiveness of pursuing various fundraising channels and donor types. This allowed them to identify which sub-units were best-in-class in terms of fundraising (independent of staff size) in order to glean and replicate best practices. It also allowed all units to allocate their limited resources to the most promising areas, ensuring that regardless of how large or small they are, they can convert staff time into dollars as efficiently as possible. 

Additionally, I'm currently working with a large international NGO on their private sector engagement strategy. An organization that deeply understands the opportunity to share the responsibility for advancing its mission with other groups, they are focused on building partners and champions in the corporate sector. We are working with them to define the go-to-market approach, typically used for Sales organizations at our corporate clients, in order to identify ways to prioritize, segment, and differentially serve different types of corporate partners. 

Before BCG, I interned at Social Finance with a focus on Social Impact Bonds. This organization set its mission on shared responsibility, and by constructing financial instruments that bring together the finance industry with government payers and non-profit implementing partners, they can truly attack major challenges such as criminal recidivism, lack of preventative healthcare, and access to education. 

In short, the problems of the world are mind-numbingly complex and often feel intractable. There are many terrific non-profit organizations that have a vision for how they will attack and ultimately eradicate one of those issues. However, they will be much more successful if they actively seek to share that responsibility with other organizations and sectors that can amplify their work.