VISION FIRST

THE FIRST STEP to any successful movement is to create a clear and compelling vision of what that movement intends to achieve. A vision is your desired future; the purpose is the reason why you want it. Ask yourself: How do you want the world to look? Why does it matter for the world to change in this way? The most successful movements have both a clear vision and a clear purpose to help others understand where you are trying to go and why they should help.

Movements are dynamic because they’re driven by a vision with a purpose. Even those people we’ve met previously in this book who started with one small action had a clear vision and purpose from the beginning. In Megan Grassell’s world, young girls can buy age-appropriate bras because girls like her sister need better choices that let them grow up at their own pace. In Neil Grimmer’s, parents can easily buy organic food for their infants because busy parents deserve to give their babies healthy food.

People often create both vision statements and mission statements when they start new organizations: a vision statement to explain the desired future and a mission statement to show what the organization intends to do in order to achieve that vision. As an example, Change.org’s mission is “to empower people everywhere to create the change they want to see” with the goal of enacting its vision of “a world where no one is powerless.” The hypothesis is that empowering people to create change on a large enough scale should lead to the desired future of a world where no one is powerless.

Once you have a clear vision (the desired future or the where) and purpose (the why), you can then create a mission (the what), strategies and tactics (the how), and goals and objectives (the how well) so you can make sure that you are on the right path toward achieving your vision. And when the journey gets difficult, your vision serves as a compass—both for you and your team. A movement simply cannot exist without a vision to rally people around, and the more clearly articulated that vision is, the easier it will be to mobilize people to achieve it.

Communicate your vision with visceral stories to help people deeply understand what it is and why it matters. We naturally find personal stories memorable, like Megan bra shopping with her sister, or Neil and his wife making baby food late at night; they help us see the motivations for their movements. You can also highlight individual stories to show how the vision will have an impact on people rather than leaving it in broad, general terms. Politicians are masters of this technique. While advocating for particular policies, they often invite individuals or families who might be affected to join the audience at a speech they are giving. The presence of these people makes vision and purpose more accessible.

Marshall Ganz, a senior lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a social organizing expert well known for his work with the United Farm Workers, goes a level deeper in utilizing storytelling as a strategy. He argues that a public narrative has three parts: a story of self, a story of us, and a story of now. A story of self covers your own personal purpose—your calling and why it matters to you. It may include personal challenges you have had to overcome or particular people or experiences that motivate you. A story of us describes the community of people you want to join you, and what you have in common that will inspire them to do so. Here you should focus on stories about shared identity and values and how those shared values can persuade them to act. And a story of now explains the urgency around acting quickly. In this story, Ganz suggests that you focus on the challenge you are facing jointly with your supporters, specific actions you want them to take, and the vision that can be achieved if they take this action with you now. Ganz has published worksheets you can find online that will walk you through how to create your own public narrative using story of self, story of us, and story of now.

Storytelling is a skill that social organizers apply excellently, and one that business leaders should consider exercising more often. When you give your vision—an abstract goal—a clear story that shows how it affects individuals, it has exponentially more impact. I’ve found that being able to communicate my vision in a heartfelt and concrete way paid off at many points in my career. I often tell the story of a movement close to my heart: getting benefits for pregnant mothers in the workplace. Once leaders heard examples of real women who were trying to pump milk in bathroom stalls or who could no longer get out of their car doors in the late stages of their pregnancies when the parking spaces were too close together (yes, that happened to me), the policies at many companies changed. (Note that there is still more to do in bringing equal treatment to all women on this front.)

THE WINNING COMBINATION FOR A MOVEMENT IS:

a clearly articulated vision that paints a picture of the way you want the world to look

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a clear purpose behind why that vision matters to you and others

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one or more compelling stories that help bring your vision and purpose to life

STORIES THAT GIVE VISION MEANING

HANK HUNT HAD a picture-perfect life. He grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas; he was a “typical southern boy who got dirty and popped wheelies on bicycles and pulled girls’ ponytails.” He moved to Texas in 1972 and married his high school sweetheart, and they had two little girls. Hank joined the armed forces as a military police officer and says he believes he did a lot of good in that job. He didn’t intend to start a movement or change the world in a big way, but he says he’s “always been the kind of person that if I see somebody that needs some help, I do what I can to help them.”

And then on December 1, 2013, tragedy struck. Hank’s wife was in Fort Worth at a Christmas bazaar, and he was home when she called around lunchtime. She told Hank that she couldn’t reach their daughter, Kari, which didn’t seem that out of the ordinary. But a few minutes later when he tried several times and got no answer, he felt the first twinge of concern, since his daughter almost always answered his calls. Then his wife told him that Kari’s husband had just posted, “Oh my God, I snapped,” on social media. Now Hank was really worried. He called the police department and the hospital to see if Kari had been admitted or whether they had been called to a domestic disturbance. He knew something was wrong when the person at the police department said, “Can I have a detective call you back?”

And something was very wrong. As Hank would soon find out, his daughter, Kari, was stabbed by her estranged husband in a hotel bathroom while her three children, ages two, four, and nine, were in the bedroom on the other side of the thin wall. Amid their mother’s screams, Hank’s oldest grandchild had tried to dial 911 to get help for her mother, but she couldn’t get the call to go through. Like most children and adults, she had no idea that in a hotel she would need to dial 9 first to get an outside line. After not being able to reach 911, she tried asking hotel employees for help and eventually reached a guest across the hall who first tried to assist, and then successfully called 911. Emergency services arrived eleven minutes after the call finally went through.

Unfortunately, it was too late. Kari died that day.

Despite his unthinkable loss, Hank has since dedicated himself tirelessly to campaigning for his vision: “Kari’s Law” would require hotels and other businesses to do away with phone systems that require dialing any additional number before calling 911. Hank envisions a world where 911 would work the same way on every phone so that no other person has to face the unspeakable agony that his granddaughter did that day. As Hank described to me: “While the law may have Kari’s name on it, it was my granddaughter who was the inspiration for it. When I had her in my lap at the police station after it happened, I can’t even begin to describe the look on her face. It was like she was searching for something because she kept looking from eye to eye, back and forth. She said, ‘Papa, I tried four times and the telephone didn’t work.’ And then it dawned on me: she was at a hotel, and hotel telephone systems required you to dial an extra number to get an outside line. But she didn’t know that. When I saw my granddaughter’s face and heard her tell me what happened, I knew it was my fault. It was everyone’s fault. Every adult is to blame because we teach our children to call 911. We advertise it. It’s on fire trucks, police cars, everywhere. But what’s not there is: ‘Call 911 unless you’re in a hotel or office building or anywhere else where you have to dial an extra number to get an outside line first.’ Kids would have to constantly relearn how to call 911 unless we get it changed.”

When you hear Hank’s story, Kari’s story, and Kari’s daughter’s story, it’s nearly impossible not to want to fix this as desperately as Hank does. Hank’s story gives power to his vision to reform 911, and that vision has become a movement. More than 600,000 people signed Hank’s Change.org petition, igniting a massive campaign. First, some large hotel companies, like the Marriott International Corporation, mandated that all hotels franchised under the Marriott brand update their phone system to be direct-dial 911. Then Hank was able to get Kari’s Law passed in several states, including Texas, New York, Illinois, Maryland, and Tennessee. And finally the bill passed unanimously in the House of Representatives in January 2017 and in the Senate in August 2017, and President Trump signed it into law in February of 2018—an enormous victory. Hank Hunt will say he still has a ways to go in order to achieve his vision of ensuring this never happens to another child, but he’s quite close now and making one hell of a difference along the way. His tragedy fuels him as well as all the other people who joined the movement for Kari’s Law.

VISION GUIDES STRATEGY

HAVING A CRYSTAL clear vision also helps you adapt when things don’t go the way you plan and you need to change your approach in order to realize your vision. In fact, it’s fairly common that the strategies you use to achieve your vision need to evolve as the world changes and you gather more information about which strategies do and don’t work. That’s what happened to Chris Ategeka after gaining a deeper understanding of the problem he was trying to solve. Chris was born in a small village in Uganda. When he was seven years old, he saw both of his parents die from AIDS within six months of each other. Despite his age, he was expected to care for his four younger siblings even as the five children became homeless and had to scrounge for food. Ultimately, they were separated to live with different families. Chris considers himself lucky. He was able to move into an orphanage and attend primary school. And later, an American family sponsored him to attend a private high school in Uganda and then helped him move to California to stay with them while he attended college. He graduated with a bachelor of science and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from U.C. Berkeley.

When Chris was nine, one of his younger brothers died while Chris and another family member were carrying him on their backs to the nearest hospital—which was ten miles away. After seeing those closest to him die without access to medical care, Chris realized the urgency of creating a world in which every human being has access to quality health care. His first entrepreneurial effort was to create a nonprofit organization, originally called Rides for Lives, to build vehicles such as motorbike ambulances to connect people in rural Ugandan communities to health and education services.

But as he learned more about the problem, he realized he would need to evolve the way he aimed to achieve his vision. His original approach assumed that getting more people to the hospital would be the key. As he explained to me: “We started off building village ambulances. When you live in a village and you have an emergency of some kind, you are pretty much out of luck. Here in America if you have an emergency, you call 911. People show up. You go to the hospital and you’re saved. Over there if you have an emergency, you are pretty stuck because there’s no such thing as 911.”

But even though they built hundreds of vehicles and delivered thousands of patients, they kept running into the same problem. “You get someone to the hospital and there is no doctor,” Chris told me. “There’s no hope for one. Or if there is one, it could take two or three or four days before it’s their turn to see the doctor. Sometimes people died before they got the chance to be seen.”

So Chris “put his engineering hat on” and tried a second approach. Instead of bringing people to the hospital, he would bring the hospital to them. Now the doctor, the lab, and the pharmacy were all inside a single bus. And instead of the patients coming to the hospital, he brought the hospital to the patients. However, there was still a problem. When the mobile hospitals came to the villages, the lines were so long that people still couldn’t get fast access to the critical health care they needed.

Seeing these extremely long lines, Chris realized that this mobile hospital approach was also unlikely to work given how few doctors were available. Whether he brought people to the hospital or brought the hospital to them, there were not enough doctors and highly trained medical workers to service the needs of the people. But Chris did not give up. He pivoted again to create Health Access Corps, whose mission is to “sustainably strengthen healthcare systems in Sub-Saharan Africa using local talent to combat the extreme shortage of healthcare professionals in underserved areas.” Despite the fact that thirty-eight of the fifty-four countries in the region have one or more medical schools graduating health-care professionals each year, sub-Saharan health-care systems are among the most understaffed in the world. Chris told me, “They are not able to retain the people they train, so what we are doing is to support young professionals who are graduating so that they can stick around and serve their populations locally.”

Once Chris identified brain drain as his vision’s fundamental obstacle, the solution to create a two-year paid fellowship program for medical professionals became clear. As he explained in an interview with NPR, “The misconception is that a doctor who just graduated [and who is] highly talented [and] highly educated do[es]n’t need any help. By thinking that way, we lose them because we can’t compensate them or pay them enough to stay.” Now all three products—the village ambulance, the mobile hospital, and the fellowship for health-care professionals in Africa—are part of Health Access Corps’ work toward realizing Chris’s vision of access to health care for every human being.

Chris has shown incredible determination throughout his whole life, from his early days fighting for his own survival to these more recent moments fighting for his vision to get quality health care to sub-Saharan Africa. His story fuels his own passion as well as that of others who have joined his movement—the staff, partners, and funders of Health Access Corps, among them Google, the United Nations Foundation, and Newman’s Own Foundation. While Chris had to continually adapt his strategy, as his initial ideas didn’t quite achieve what he wanted, each time he learned something new about why the current idea didn’t work and how he should evolve it. By being so clear about his ultimate vision, he has been able to get closer to achieving it with each successive strategy.

THEORY OF CHANGE

ONCE YOU HAVE a compelling vision and the purpose behind it clearly articulated, the next step is to think about how to make it a reality—what steps will be required to spark and maintain that movement to get the result you want? In the world of social change organizations, nonprofits, and often in government, it is common to use a methodology called the Theory of Change as a means to maximize the chances of success for a desired change. This method involves starting with the goals you want to achieve and then identifying the necessary preconditions to reach those goals and the links between each outcome along the way. While it is typical in most organizations to set goals and use metrics to measure them, this approach is different. It specifically examines how the goals relate to the end result you are trying to achieve and how the goals relate to one another. With a Theory of Change, you focus on how one step in a process is a precondition for the next, starting with the result that you want and then working backward to determine the steps to get there. What are the things you need to do? Whom do you need to persuade? Is it believable that one step will lead to the next, and that by following those steps you can reach your goal? Put more simply, a Theory of Change is a hypothesis about the steps that will lead to your desired outcome: A + B + C = D.

As an example, petitions that are successful at Change.org each have a good Theory of Change. For petition starters, the vision or outcome they want to achieve depends on being able to persuade a specific decision-maker (elected official, corporate exec, etc.) who actually has the ability to make the desired change. So a good Theory of Change for a petition involves making sure you identify the right decision-maker, creating an ask that the decision-maker might be willing or even excited to agree to, and then outlining a compelling reason for them to do it. If you start with the results you want—your vision—you can work backward to the steps you need to take and the people you need to influence in order to make it happen. Each movement would have its own unique Theory of Change based on identifying the vision and the necessary preconditions for that outcome to occur.

Change.org as a company has a Theory of Change for how it intends to achieve its vision, which says:

The elements of the Theory of Change build on each other. Each one is a precondition of the next. You can’t effectively engage decision-makers without having enough mass mobilization to help them understand the importance of a given change; you can’t mobilize large numbers of supporters unless you first empower people to come forward as organizers with something to mobilize people around, and so on.

The chart that follows is from the Center for Theory of Change, a nonprofit that promotes standards and best practices for implementing a Theory of Change. It shows a more detailed example from Project Superwomen, a collaboration of several organizations working toward a vision of a world where domestic violence survivors have stable, long-term employment at livable wages. They started at the top and worked backward, identifying the preconditions for each outcome.

Sample Theory of Change from Project Superwomen

CENTER FOR THEORY OF CHANGE

You can imagine how a Theory of Change would work in a more traditional business as well. For instance, if Alli Webb at Drybar ultimately envisions a world where women can feel more confident every day because their hair looks great, then preconditions of her achieving that vision at scale might be the expansion into more locations, the development of products people can use at home, and training tools (like books and videos) that teach people how to style their hair on their own—all of which Drybar is currently doing.

There is more detail available about this process at the website of the Center for Theory of Change. Once you have created a clear Theory of Change—a road map for how you plan to achieve your vision—you can use it as a guide for what to prioritize, how to measure whether each step is working, and whether or not you are staying on track to achieve your goal.

KINDLING FOR YOUR FIRE

YOUR VISION AND purpose may be deeply personal, but ultimately, you need to attract passionate supporters to ensure that your movement takes off. Finding those first few people who can influence others to support you is a critical next step. If you view your own idea as the spark for your movement, then these early, influential supporters are the kindling for your fire. In his TED talk about starting movements, entrepreneur Derek Sivers illustrates this point with a video example of a lone man dancing energetically at a concert. As soon as a second person gets up to dance with him, others quickly follow. Sivers notes that you don’t have a movement until you have your first followers—those courageous people who stand up to join you. How you find and treat those first followers is key to the ultimate success of your cause. Your first supporters are leaders, too, and they decide whether your movement takes off.

Megan at Yellowberry had success through an influential blog on Facebook that posted about her product. Alli Webb’s first loyal clients supported her move to her initial physical location, and a post in the popular blog DailyCandy spiked interest in her business. Each of these movement starters used creativity and persistence to find the right influencers to spread the word and help their ideas catch fire.

Influencers are any individuals with a following of people who trust them; celebrities and journalists are obvious influencers, but coworkers, teachers, and even friends and family can be influencers if they can reach enough people. The statistics show just how persuasive influencers are: according to Nielsen, 92 percent of people trust recommendations from individuals—even if they don’t know them—more than they trust other more traditional forms of advertising. Influencers exist in many different forms and are motivated by different things, so the key is to research and understand who might be the influencers in your category, your location, etc. Sometimes they are bloggers, YouTubers, or other online personalities with large followings. Sometimes they are members of the press, and sometimes they are the most influential people in a neighborhood or within an organization.

There is a growing industry around paid influencer marketing, yet there are many times when, especially for an important purpose, influencers will support a cause they believe in without expecting payment. The key is to make the influencers feel as though they are getting something of value in return for their promotion, whether that value is something of theirs you agree to promote in return (sometimes called “share for share”), getting early or free access to a product, or just being able to feel good that they made a positive difference in the world. Understanding and persuading influencers to support your movement can work using techniques similar to the ones we’ll discuss in Chapter 4 about how to persuade decision-makers—the people with the power to make a change you are looking for.

Often, “micro-influencers,” who have a strong and engaged relationship with a smaller set of relevant people, can be more effective at getting your message to the right audience than celebrities with huge followings, as Gretta Rose van Riel discovered. Gretta is a serial entrepreneur from Australia who had started several multimillion-dollar businesses before she was thirty, beginning with SkinnyMe Tea, which created the category of tea-based cleanses she calls “teatoxes.” She’s also a major influencer in her own right, often called “the Instagram queen” because she now has a combined following across her businesses of over 16 million people. Gretta believed that her product would advance her vision of creating an easy way for people to be healthier, and she wanted to reach young women like herself. She reached out to people on Instagram who fit her target audience and had over 1,000 followers, and sent them some free tea. It was remarkably effective. As Gretta described in an interview with Influencive, SkinnyMe Tea had grown to $600,000 per month in sales, just six months after Gretta founded the company. She says, “Back in 2012, one girl from Tasmania had 1000 followers, posted our tea and made the most sales we ever had in a day. After that, I’d screenshot every girl with over 1000 followers, and reach out to them with our tea. When we reached out to girls, they were so not used to being approached, 90–95% of influencers were stoked to do it. They weren’t used to VIP treatment, no companies were sending out free stuff back then! We were one of the first brands, if not the first, to pursue influencer branding at the time.”

It was such an effective model for Gretta that she was able to replicate it for several other businesses. Although she describes feeling like it was a fluke or just luck, she studied all the data she had about which of her strategies were working and uncovered how to replicate her success in spreading her movement. In a recent interview with Foundr, Gretta describes three techniques she believes work especially well for getting the most out of collaborating with influencers:

UNDERSTANDING THE CHANNELS for social promotion that you have available is critical. Katherine Krug is the founder and CEO of BetterBack, a company that designs products to help ease lower back pain. She is the first solo female entrepreneur to raise over $1 million on Kickstarter for her business; now, she has raised more than $3 million on multiple crowdfunding sites. When she was first getting started, one key to her early success was understanding how the algorithms worked on Kickstarter so she could get her project featured in the “Most Popular” category. As she said in an interview with Forbes, “The North Star of any campaign should be getting into the Most Popular category so people browsing on the platform can see your project. The most important factor in the Most Popular algorithm is the number of backers, NOT dollars raised, over a given period.” So Katherine e-mailed 120 of her friends asking if they would each be willing to give one dollar on the day of the launch. This strategy, similar to Gretta’s Thunderclap technique, paid off. On its launch day, BetterBack made it to the Most Popular category. Katherine has maintained momentum long after launch by rigorously looking at the data, watching which messages and calls to action are most effective.

Katherine built her movement through crowdfunding because it gave her direct access to her customers and supporters. As she told Forbes, “Crowdfunding has democratized access to capital and removed all the gatekeepers. There is not a room full of men to pitch to.” Instead, she said, “the only people you have to pitch and satisfy are your future customers.” If you choose this approach, make sure you take good care of those supporters to keep the movement going. Katherine provides regular updates about her project, giving backers access to upgrades and discounts, and quickly responds to their questions. “Your backers are literally bringing your dream to life,” she told Forbes, “so think about how you can add value through every single interaction.”

FOLLOWERS BECOME LEADERS

JENNIFER CARDENAS GREW up the daughter of a single mom, fiercely self-sufficient, often taking care of her younger sister, and with the desire to always be the responsible one. She has spent her whole life in two small towns outside Houston, right in the epicenter of where Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017. She and her family had originally planned to stay in their home during the storm, having lived through other hurricanes. But when a mandatory evacuation was ordered, Jennifer and her family left home in a rush at the last possible moment.

As they drove toward San Antonio, Jennifer saw many of her friends posting on Facebook about where they were evacuating, so she decided to create a Facebook group so they could keep track of where everyone was, and whether they were safe or needed help. She called it “Hurricane Harvey 2017.” She wrote to her friends: “Hey guys, I made this group so I can keep in touch with you all, and you can all keep in touch with me. I can only add 50 people right now, I’m in a hurry, but I’ll add some more people later. You are all free to add your family and friends so everyone can keep in touch. Bye.” And then she went to dinner with her family. When she looked back at the group later that evening, 800 people had asked to join.

The group grew exponentially; the next day there were 30,000 members, and within four days, more than 150,000. Jennifer reached out to her sister, Shanna Lyons, in Maryland, to help, since she knew she couldn’t manage it all on her own. And then something magical happened—people from all around the country and the world started offering their expertise. People who had lived through similar experiences posted live videos with advice for how to survive a large storm, one woman offered a spreadsheet she had used to coordinate previous disasters, and other people offered help to Jennifer and her sister by serving as moderators of the group, facilitators of rescues, and more. Though Jennifer had started the group and had been its initial leader, her first supporters became leaders in their own right.

And these volunteer leaders were critical to the success of the group. When Jennifer drove back to her hometown of Ingleside, Texas, the day after the storm, she had trouble getting Internet service for the next several days. And the group kept going, even without her online. Jennifer says that when she was finally able to get service, she couldn’t believe what was happening. “I started seeing the rescues,” she told me. “People were posting ‘Please help, I’m on my roof.’ And then I would see ‘Rescued.’ And I had all of these messages that said things like, ‘Oh my god, you have saved so many lives. Thank you for what you’ve done.’” She called her sister to find out what was happening, and Shanna said, “Jennifer, it’s incredible what’s happening. We are conducting rescues, we have dispatch teams, we have rescue teams. We’re coordinating with Coast Guard and National Guard and local and state services and agencies, and lives are being saved. It’s an amazing thing.”

People unified around the common purpose of the group, and they all wanted to be a part of it; there were eighty volunteer moderators who took leadership roles in the community and thousands more who lent a helping hand however they could. They took over where Jennifer had started. Working together with first responders, Jennifer’s Facebook community was responsible for rescuing more than eight thousand people during Hurricane Harvey. The community is still active, though its purpose has evolved. Now it helps people manage the complex and emotional process of rebuilding: navigating FEMA, providing advice on how to rebuild homes, coordinating clothing and furniture donations, and anything else that other members need. It may take years to recover, and Jennifer’s community will continue to play an important role.

THE WORK YOU do to create a clear and compelling vision—of articulating and refining what you want to create and why—will pay off when starting your movement. Once you have a sharp and focused view of your desired future, you can then successfully motivate and inspire others to join you.