Good Intentions, Good Results: Making a Positive Social Impact

[This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of the Tuck Knowledge in Practice Podcast is the audio record.]

Kirk Kardashian:

This is Kirk Kardashian, and you're tuned in to Knowledge and Practice, a podcast from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. In this podcast, we talk with Tuck professors about their research and teaching and the story behind their curiosity. Today my guest is Robert Searle, T’ 96, an adjunct professor at Tuck who teaches a course called managing for Social Impact.

The goal of the course is to help students appreciate what it takes to turn good intentions into good results for society. Bob is a partner at the Bridgespan Group, a global nonprofit that advises and consults with social change leaders such as philanthropists, nonprofit and NGO leaders, and mission aligned private capital partners.

A fun fact about Bob is that before attending Tuck, he pursued a career as a professional musician, which included four years with the US Marine Band in Washington, D.C., and performances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Seattle Symphony. Bob Searle, welcome to Knowledge and Practice.

Bob Searle:

Thanks. It's great to be here.

Kirk Kardashian:

Yeah. It's a it's a real honor that you made some time for us. Uh, so you teach a course at Tuck called managing for Social Impact. What is social impact and why is it the subject of an MBA course?

Bob Searle:

Well good question. And in fact, that's where we start in the very first session. I've compiled a just a document that has a bunch of different definitions of social impact and ask the students to read them. And we talk about what resonated, what doesn't resonate. How do you define it? And it's really less about a specific definition honestly then.

And this sort of gets at the second part of your question, really helping students at least take some time when they're up at Tuck to center this idea of social impact and the impact that the decisions they make and the actions they take have on society as a whole, however, however they define it, um, the conversation often gets into does does something have to be intentional in order for it to count or does?

Is social impact always positive? And the reality is every action we take has some kind of impact on the people around us, communities, whatever. And so we want I want students to think about how to factor in those kinds of values, their own values, whatever they are. I'm not trying to tell them what their values are, but that they should be explicitly factoring that into their life choices and use that lens with some intentionality.

Um, so that's one of the goals of the course, is just to take some time to examine that and think about how that might affect decisions that that students might make. One of the other goals of the course, and we'll get into this as we go, probably is I recognize that most students will never work at a nonprofit.

A few of them have, or they might, but but most of them never, never will. But they're likely to be donating to nonprofits, volunteering, maybe even serving on boards. And I really want them to understand some of the idiosyncrasies of the nonprofit sector so that they'll be more effective in those roles.

And so that's the other kind of goal. So when we start with this idea of social impact, and we talk about nonprofits as organizations who who exist solely to have social impact, that's that's really the other lens that we work through.

Kirk Kardashian:

So, so one of the goals of the course is to help students, uh, have have not just good intentions, but good results from those intentions. Right. Um, what are some examples of, uh, you know, good intentions gone wrong and good intentions gone right in sort of the pantheon of, of of social impact and the way you think about it.

Bob Searle:

Well, one really famous one that is most people have heard of is the Dare program, um, which is a drug prevention program. Lots of publicity. Catchy name started back in the 80s, and there was literally no evidence that it has any impact at all. You know, this idea of keeping kids from using drugs in multiple studies have shown not only that it doesn't help, but in fact, it might spark curiosity in a way.

And and so more importantly, that that than the idea that it didn't work is more why? And it's a lot about how it was delivered. Um, The curriculum really had had no was not evidence based at all. You had police officers going into schools and basically lecturing kids. It wasn't an engaging, interactive kind of curriculum at all.

And and so that's an example of something that had a lot of publicity behind it, a lot of funding, a lot of interest that literally did did no good at all. And you contrast that with there's of course, countless examples of, of very effective programming to that that we talk about in the class. One is the Nurse Family Partnership is an organization that was actually founded out of university, out in Colorado, and they trained registered nurses to work with low income women who are oftentimes first time mothers.

They might not even be married. They might be single parents prior to the baby being born, helping them with nutrition and thinking about that and then working with those young people, those young mothers through the first year of the baby's life and the outcomes in terms of for those children and the mothers, but mostly the children in terms of kindergarten readiness, success in school, long term life outcomes.

There have been multiple scientific and quasi scientific studies that have shown strong positive outcomes, differentiated from a control group of similar people. So that's that's an example of a direct service, very intensive program, expensive program that has a lot of results. Another one that's very, uh, you know, has a lot of scale is mosquito netting in Africa.

So, uh, the Gates Foundation Health Program, uh, found that a very simple anti-malaria, uh, intervention is to distribute mosquito netting that have been that that's been treated with, um, insecticide or some kind of insect repellent. It's and in a way that's not toxic to human beings, but to the use of those settings has really had a huge impact on malaria in Africa and South America.

So, you know, things like that where there's been a thoughtful approach. There's been some proof points and testing, really trying to understand what is it that makes that intervention so effective, and then making sure you zero in on that and figure out a path to scale. Those are some examples of things that could be very effective, that you are turning intentions into results.

And it's not just wishful thinking and something that feels catchy.

Kirk Kardashian:

Yeah, yeah. Well that's that's really interesting. Um, so when you're running a nonprofit versus a, uh, a for profit company, the goals, I imagine, are very different, right? Um, which probably translates into very different strategies. Um, can you talk a bit about how the strategy differs between nonprofit and a for profit?

Bob Searle:

Sure. And I will argue with anyone that running a nonprofit is much more complicated and harder than running a successful business. Just full stop. And there's at least a couple of reasons for that. So one is this idea of how do you define success? So when we think about strategy, our definition very simply is how do you translate your available resources into the maximum possible social impact.

And for each individual organization, the answer to that question is going to be quite different. And it starts with how do we define success? What what impact are we trying to have? What are the outcomes that we're holding ourselves accountable for as an organization? Who is our target population? What are the interventions?

What are the activities that we believe will lead to that impact? And so you really for a nonprofit, it's very easy to have broad definitions of all of those things. And what that ends up doing is diffusing your, your, um, activities. So whatever your limited resources are, you're not concentrating them in the way that is going to maximize impact.

So when we do strategy work with nonprofits, a lot of it is about that. Let's get as specific as possible about who are you designing your programs for and what are you holding yourself accountable for, and how will you know if you're successful? So that whole thing is,

Bob Searle:

Uh, much less clear than it might be for an equivalent company where you're saying we're maximizing profit. We have this single metric. Now, how we get there may be different, but that definition of success is pretty clear. The second thing that makes nonprofit strategy more complicated is in most cases, the beneficiary of the program is not the the entity that's paying for it.

So if you're a nonprofit leader, you're essentially running two businesses. You're running a business that delivers social impact, and you're running a second business that is trying to foster financial sustainability. And those two things are very rarely connected. And so Whatever you do, you have to think about, well, how do I make this sustainable and how do I get funders?

And as you can imagine, people with money have ideas about how something should go and that. And so you have all of these different constituencies that you have to try to navigate their priorities, their beliefs about, about what should be happening. And that just makes life very complicated.

Kirk Kardashian:

Hmm. Yeah. It almost sounds like the you could analogize that to the stakeholders or shareholders in a, in a public company having ideas about how the company should be run.

Bob Searle:

Yes, exactly. But an individual shareholder, unless it's a very large shareholder, doesn't have the same kind of control or leverage, I guess, over the the company, as as you might see, especially in a smaller nonprofit that may be dependent on a few sources of funding. And that's often a danger in a risk.

Kirk Kardashian:

Yeah, I can I can understand that. Uh. So, uh, this is this probably gets into very specific answers here, but what are some of the ways that nonprofits measure or try to measure impact, you know, what are their metrics?

Bob Searle:

Yeah. And this gets this is another way that that things can get complicated, because there isn't this single metric that everything can boil down to. And that, that's for sure, is a source of frustration. But the metrics really go back to the definition of success. And and it's probably worth some definitions.

So I've used this, this word outcomes, um, a few different times. So we talk about metrics in a few different categories. And one of them is outcomes. And an outcome is very simply it's a change whatever. And so for an individual it's it's if you're thinking about a program that provides some sort of direct service to a set of clients, it's a change in knowledge or skills or behaviors or their conditions.

So if they go from being unemployed to employed, or they go from reading below grade level to reading at grade level or ahead of grade level. So that change and figuring out what is the what is the associated metric. Um, is is one of the ways that we think about measuring success. Now, as I said, it's not simple, but it's relatively more straightforward for direct service providers who might say, okay, we're we are trying to improve reading levels.

So what percentage of the young people who participate in our program achieve this many months gain in their reading level in a certain period of time? Or you know, what percentage of participants have a living wage employment one year after participating in our program? There are things like that. Um, but if you're working in an area of, let's say, policy change or you're trying to to do big picture systems change or influence around a certain thing, or you're an intermediary organization who is working sort of between direct service providers and or organizing, say, direct service providers. A very famous example of this is an organization called Strive, which works in communities with multiple nonprofits who are working together on this idea of cradle to career success. So they've all agreed that they're going to be measuring things like kindergarten readiness and third grade literacy, and the percentage of of eighth graders who take algebra and these markers along the way, high school graduation.

Um, and so any individual organization might be working on one of those metrics, but an organization like strive, which is sort of stepping back from that and coordinating everything, you know, how do they define success? Well. And so so those things start to get a little bit trickier. And for that kind of thing, or if you're trying to change public policy, where first of all, the process is really complicated and it's very slow and at cause and effect is much harder to, um, establish for any individual organization there.

You might be looking at more what we would call output measures. So measures of activity. So that might be for, for a um for a policy change, it might be the number of supporters who've signed on to a piece of legislation, or if the legislation gets introduced or if a bill gets passed and that sort of thing.

But even there, any individual organization can't say we did this. And so that kind of act metric activity is, is, uh, you know, there's as much art as science in it as well. And when we, we work with clients, I should have mentioned, I worked for an organization called the Bridgespan Group, and we provide strategic consulting services to nonprofits.

And when we talk about measurement, we talk about it in the context of learning and improvement. So one of the things you're trying to learn, what are you testing. How can data help you Understand what's happening and make improvements over time. And that's a big part of the measurement that we do.

Kirk Kardashian:

Yeah, yeah, I imagine that it's the the metric question is quite data intensive. Um, which kind of makes me wonder how non-profits are deploying AI these days to help them measure that. Is that is it happening? I'm sure it is.

Bob Searle:

Oh, it definitely is. And it's it's a scary thing. I mean, it's just it's a scary thing for everybody because nobody really knows what's going to happen. Um, but in some ways, it it can certainly streamline a lot of these things for nonprofits, which is good because measurement is one of the many things that it's very hard to raise money for.

So funders, this is one of the frustrations. They want data. They want they you know, how how did you report on this grant? But we're not going to actually fund you to build the infrastructure that will allow you to to report on the grant, because we only want to fund programmatic work. And so, you know, creative use of AI can can help with things like data collection.

Or I'm working with an organization right now that that that helps people navigate certain to public, um, assistance or different processes like that. And so, you know, bots can help help do that, but that also takes some expertise that a lot of non-profits may or may not have. So, so it's a little bit of a, a wild West right now, which I probably is not that different from corporations.

Kirk Kardashian:

Yeah, yeah. Uh, well, let's switch gears a bit. Um, so you went to BU for your undergrad, uh, and you got a degree in music performance? That's right. And you're a professional musician. The for the US Marine Band. Um, and then you went to tuck sometime in there? I guess maybe after, I don't know, um, much after.

After. Uh. So tell me about how you got into the field of social impact and kind of consulting for social impact.

Bob Searle:

Sure. So yes, as you as you did your homework. I majored in music performance and I my intention was to be a professional musician, and I played for years in the U.S. Marine Band in Washington, D.C., and that was the only full time music job I ever had. Um, I actually dropped out of college to to take that job and decided pretty early on in that job that if that was the best I could do, I was not going to be a musician.

And it turned out, after another ten years or so of trying to get, uh, a full time orchestra job, uh, it just it was clear that wasn't going to happen. And so for me, business school was a career pivot. And it was it was both an opportunity to get a credential, because I literally didn't have any full time real job on my resume, because as a musician, you're playing gigs or whatever.

And but I had a lot of part time jobs, and the jobs that I had found most fulfilling were the ones in the social sector. So I had worked in arts administration. I was a part time orchestra manager for a youth orchestra. I worked in the office at the Ronald McDonald House in Washington, D.C., and so when I went to business school and my whole plan was to build a set of skills and then go work in, in the social sector, because if I had to spend all day working, I wanted to do something that I was feeling like I was making a difference.

And for a variety of reasons, I didn't go directly into that because I felt like, okay, two years at Tuck is certainly helpful, but I'm not. I still have a lot of to learn and skills to build and all that sort of thing. So I went into consulting. Uh, it was literally the only job I could get out of, out of business school because I didn't have any work experience, and I couldn't, I couldn't really sell the people at Gillette that my life's ambition was to sell razor blades or whatever, you know.

But in consulting, they don't really care what your motivations are. They just want to know if you could do the work. So I ended up in consulting. Bridge span didn't exist at the time. Bridge span is a nonprofit and but it it started shortly after that. And so once I learned about bridge span, I thought, well, people go work at Bain and then they go run a company.

So I'll go work at Bridgespan, which spun out of Bain, and eventually I'll go run a nonprofit. And I've been at Bridge Span ever since. For the most part, I took two years. I did a little bit of a took a detour, mostly because running a nonprofit is so hard. And I'm really it's not I'm not cut out for it. You know, if you're an executive director of a nonprofit, you're spending the vast majority of your time schmoozing, raising money, um, operating on a shoestring. It is a very hard job. And the role I have now is helping those leaders who I admire very deeply do their work more effectively, and I work with their leadership teams.

We help with strategy. So. So I just found that that this is the right place for me to advise those leaders and, and but that that is my journey basically.

Kirk Kardashian:

Wow. That's interesting. So thanks for sharing that. What's your instrument?

Bob Searle:

I play the tuba.

Kirk Kardashian:

Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Nice.

Bob Searle:

So not very many jobs out there.

Kirk Kardashian:

That's a special instrument.

Bob Searle:

It's very special. Is a good way to put it.

Kirk Kardashian:

Yeah.

Kirk Kardashian:

Um, so how did you end up teaching at Tuck?

Bob Searle:

So my, I graduated in 96, and in my second year, there was a professor by the name of John Vogel, who was a real estate professor, but had worked in a community development corporation in Boston. And he he was very interested in, in the social sector. And he started this mini course and I don't actually remember what it was called back then, but in my second year he offered this mini course and I took the mini course, and then I got involved with tuck through what is now called the center for business, Government and Society.

But a few iterations before that. And so I stayed in touch with John and um, about five years ago. So John retired and somebody else took the class over. And she is a woman named Nan Stone, who was the first knowledge partner at Bridgespan. So she had been the editor of the Harvard Business Review. She's a brilliant writer, brilliant editor. She helped us launch our knowledge strategy, all the publications that we do and that sort of thing.

She lives up in New Hampshire. She's so she took over the course from John, and then I basically took over the course from her. We co-taught it in 2021, which was the COVID year, which was kind of a miserable experience Because it was kind of it was hybrid and it was the worst of both worlds, really. Some students in the classroom, others on Zoom.

It was terrible. But then she stepped back and I took over the course starting in 22. And it's just been one of the one of the most fulfilling things I've done. Um, and the students are just energizing. They're they're super interested in what we're doing. They bring all different levels of knowledge and background and interest.

And so it is always different every year. And it's just been a really fulfilling thing for me to do.

Kirk Kardashian:

That's great. Well, we're we're glad to have you. Uh, so I when I was reading your syllabus, I noticed that you have six guests that are Dartmouth or Tuck alumni. Um, can you talk a little bit about the guests you bring in and what they might reveal about the social impact careers of tuck, uh, or Dartmouth students?

Bob Searle:

Yeah. And that's intentional. Well, it's for two reasons. One, I'm, I'm certain they're going to get tired of just listening to me after 4 or 5 classes. So that's about when we bring the guests in. And then what what what I've done is, is, uh, ask people to come in to sort of bring to life some element of the social sector that, that, that I think more most students will be interested in.

So, uh, have a colleague who's a former colleague because I was at New Profit for a little while, which is a venture philanthropy fund to talk about venture philanthropy and why, you know, how that model, how the model of of, um, of, uh, what's it called? Venture capital has translated into the social sector.

What what ports and what doesn't. Where does the model break down? But this idea of investing unrestricted dollars and taking a board seat and providing advice and that sort of thing, which I think students might find really interesting, is maybe a different way to give their own money away. Um, people, a couple of folks who are working at the intersection of climate and in one case, forestry, but also conservation and thinking about carbon credits as a tool.

So things that I think the students will be interested in. But I want them to see people who are working in those areas just in case. That is something they won't want to do. But I also want each of the guests to talk about their own journeys and the choices they've made and why, and and what they have found challenging, what's been fulfilling and that sort of thing.

So it really gives the students a bunch of different of the, you know, a broader set of those stories, not just mine as as they're thinking about their own careers.

Kirk Kardashian:

Yeah. Oh, that's that's interesting. Um, do you think tuck is particularly well suited, you know, to produce graduates who work towards social impact?

Bob Searle:

I don't know about directly, but but as I said before, certainly indirectly and also they may decide to make different choices in their in their their traditional careers with this lens. So, you know, most most people come out of Tuck, just to be completely pragmatic about it. If you have a lot of debt, it's very hard to take a job in the nonprofit sector because they don't pay as well.

I mean, um, the equivalent job in the for profit sector is going to pay significantly more whether you're working at Bridge Span, which we pay pretty well, but we don't pay as well as Bain. Um, or if you're going to work for, for a more traditional nonprofit so that, that, that that may factor in to a decision that somebody makes.

But if you're going to be a board member or you're going to be a donor, there are ways you can do that that will be higher impact than other ways. And part of what this class is intended to do is help people understand those differences, the the idiosyncrasies, the dysfunctions of the how the financial markets work and and how you can either help or exacerbate those those dysfunctions in that field.

So that that's how I think about it. For for tuck students.

Kirk Kardashian:

What aspects of social impact are you focused on these days and how does your tuck experience inform your work?

Bob Searle:

So the big thing right now, I mean, probably the biggest thing, is just all the disruption and uncertainty and upheaval mostly being driven by the federal government. Um, federal government is the largest source of revenue to the social sector, and a lot of that is either already been cut or is so uncertain that that organizations really need to be planning for things to be cut.

And a lot of it happened very abruptly. I mean, USAID is probably the most prominent example where it just disappeared and there were organizations working globally. One of one of them, uh, is will be participating in my class. That was a huge part of their funding. And now it's just gone. So that helping leaders figure out how to manage through that uncertainty and whether that's scenario planning or, uh, really, you know, any other kind of model is really where a lot of this work is, is being done.

And it all comes back to strategy is really saying what what is the core of what you're trying to do, and how do you zero in on that and make sure you preserve it? And how do you prepare for whatever the future will be? Because we're going to be rebuilding something that's different. Um, you know, on the one hand, it was a tragedy the way USAID was dismantled.

On the other hand, nobody thought USAID was a particularly effective institution. And so if we get a chance to rebuild it, what might it look like? And that's where I think the, the, the experience and and the training that I got at Tuck can be really helpful because it really is helping to bring structure and framework and, and a systematic approach to thinking through some of these big questions and that's that.

That is the fundamental takeaway from from tuck. I mean, I've been out 30 years. So the specifics of what I learned are pretty fuzzy. But the thinking and the approach is what I use every day.

Kirk Kardashian:

Yeah. Great. Uh, well, it's been really great to talk with you, Bob. Thanks so much for your time.

Bob Searle:

Well, it's been a pleasure. I really enjoyed it. It actually helped me think a little bit more. Okay, why did I do this? And what am I trying to do with it as I'm starting the class next week? It really reframes it for me in a way. That's that's very helpful.

Kirk Kardashian:

Yeah. Good. Well, good luck in your course. And, uh, and thanks again.

Bob Searle:

My pleasure.

Kirk Kardashian:

I'd like to thank my guest, Bob Searle. You have been listening to Knowledge and Practice, a podcast from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. See you next time.