Nathan Gwilliam Blog :: Social Media, Social Entrepreneurship, Faith

I recently finished Made to Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath and thoroughly enjoyed this book.  One of my favorite portions described the “Mother Teresa Principle”.  One of this saintly woman’s famous teachings was, ”If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”  

 

Made to Stick talks about a research study that compared the effectiveness of donation requests using different approaches.  One donation request provided statistics about the masses of people in one region of Africa facing hunger and poverty.  The second letter simply told the story of one needy girl from that region and said that all money donated would go to her.   Obviously, the second letter was tremendously more successful.  

People are much more willing to help if they know of a specific need, instead of just helping a cause.  In other words, when people learn of a huge problem they often feel that “someone should do something”, but they feel the problem is too large for them to solve themselves, so they do nothing.  It’s kind of like a room that is so messy you don’t know where to start, so you go do something else.  However, when we connect with a specific person with a specific need, we are much more likely to sacrifice and help, because we know we can do something to make a huge difference to that person with whom we are connected.  The specific connection makes the service much more real and meaningful. 

The Adoption.com Photolisting is an example of this principle that I have observed first hand.   When prospective adoptive parents are able to see pictures and read bios of orphans they often connect with and then adopt a specific child.  Many parents choose to adopt internationally after connecting with a specific child, who otherwise would not have adopted. Many parents who thought they only wanted to adopt a healthy Caucasian infant in the U.S. end up adopting an older, special needs child from a foreign country because of the connection which they formed with that child by using the photolisting.

If I came to your church congregation and spoke about the many foster children in your state who need to be adopted, I might have a few families come talk to me after the service.  However, if I brought 12 of those foster children with me and explained that I needed emergency foster homes for those children that night, ALL of the children would be taken in (if the families were qualified), and most of those children (if not all) would be permanently adopted by families in that congregation.

Think about it.  How many of us would, without a second thought, take in a starving orphan who showed up on our doorstep needing a place to stay?  I believe there is enough food, money, compassion, time, and great people in this world to solve huge social crises such as the world orphan crisis, hunger, needless death to curable diseases, and poverty.  The problem is not a lack of resources, but instead is effectively connecting those resources with great people who would be willing to help.  

So, then the question is how we can create those connections on a scale large enough to solve the otherwise insurmountable social problems in our world.  Kiva has showed us one of the large pieces of this solution by helping to everyday people, like my family, connect with and lend to entrepreneurs in third-world countries.  On-the-ground organizations help qualify and administer the loans.  And, their repayment rate would put to shame EVERY major bank in the United States.  My family tried to make a loan around Christmas time through Kiva, and the system was a little too effective.  There were more than thousands of people making loans and only four entrepreneurs seeking loans.  By the time we read through a newly posted loan and tried to participate in the loan, the full loan had already been fully funded.  There were more people at that time trying to loan than people listed seeking loans.  I just looked at Kiva as I wrote this blog entry, and it looks like there are now 208 active entrepreneurs listed seeking loans.  However, just in the last week more than 2,000 loans have been made by people like you and I, totaling more than $750,000.  This is another example that there is an abundance of great people, food, money, compassion and time to solve the world’s greatest social problems.  We just have to figure out how to create the specific connections.  

I want to build my future career greatly around this concept of creating connections to solve world social crises.  How can we more effectively build connections between great people in need and the great people who would love to help if they were just connected with specific situations? 

Posted on January 10th, 2009 by Nathan Gwilliam
Filed under: Adoption, Charity, Ending Poverty, Entrepreneurship, Ethics, Giving Back, Global Orphan Crisis, Innovation, Microlending, Social Enterprise, e-Business