<disclaimer> Some of the ideas below are mental ramblings that I am having and are still in a formative stage – let me know what you think! </disclaimer>

Have you ever created a document, or a presentation that at the time was in your own eyes, passable, but you thought you could have done better. Then you revisit it a few weeks / months later and it actually looks a lot better. I think it happens a lot, well for me it does.

I have been reflecting on what I have termed ‘The Gap Hypothesis’ as being one of the foundations of The Broccoli Project.

The idea behind this, is that an upliftment program is introduced, the intention is to create a result that leaves the participant in a situation in a better position than before. So in the above simple example, a person sleeping on the streets is encouraged to take a number of steps and as a result becomes a happier member of society.

But what about the gaps ?, I believe that the steps to be taken from beginning to end of an intervention are riddled with all sorts of gaps that might prevent a program from succeeding.  What happens if the steps to be taken have no real grounding in the reality of the participants. For example, what if the next step is to have a participant go to a clinic for a check up, but the cost of transport is beyond the means of the participant. Something as simple as access to transport has a potentially devastating effect on the success of program, but more importantly the participant.

If you were able to measure the success of each step of a program, through an anonymous yet unique identifier you would be able to design programs and correct assumptions of each step. You might think that the steps for a program are easy enough to complete, but often our assumptions fall down when put into practice. Von Moltke’s saying “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy”  is something that every organization encounters at one time or another.

The Broccoli Project approaches projects with a tentative viewpoint – It draws  on the ideas of the genius of place and Sternin-Pascale’s notion of  positive deviance. The above image is a basic representation of the basic mechanics.

For each step, we are providing an incentive. The incentive is something simple and basic like food, shelter, accommodation, medical care.

You see, we don’t know that each step is the right step from a multitude of dimensions:

  1. Is the step understood (from the participants perspective)
  2. Is the incentive correct (from a value and type perspective)
  3. Is it viewed as an incentive or could it be viewed as coercion
  4. Will it be over-subscribed, under-subscribed.

Using a combination of incentives, biometrics, mobile technology, cloud computing and low cost net books we are in a position for the first time to begin measuring the effects of each step of a proposed intervention in a  granular yet anonymous way. These are early days, but our analytics platform combined with the fundraising interface is a step closer toward creating programs that work.

The idea is this, the interventions are unitized in cost – i.e. each step is pre-budgeted with the costs (simplified)  allocated as follows:

  1. The cost of carrying out the intervention
  2. The cost of the incentive to be given to the recipient
  3. The technology costs to measure and capture the data

With these simple metrics, the cost and success per intervention can be quickly established and the most powerful being the success of the next step.

It is estimated that there is an 80% dropout rate once people discover they are HIV positive – they never make it to the referring clinic – the tragedy is that if detected early, HIV can be treated and managed.The reasons are varied and complex, but some of the important work is to de-stigmatize the disease and to find ways to encourage after care.