Tribal Proof

According to Bibb Lantane, social psychologist, the relationship between three social forces can determine the amount of social influence. Those three forces are:

Importance: how important is an organization or group to the people you hope to impact?

Proximity: how close, physically in space and time, are you to the people you are trying to influence?

Number of People Engaged: how many people are you able to reach and engage?

The Legatum Foundation (http://www.legatum.org/sii) looks at these categories when calculating an organization’s social impact:

Breadth of Impact  A measurement of how many people the project impacts.

Changing Paradigms  The degree to which the project encouraged mindset and behavior changes.

Wellbeing  The degree to which a person experiences improved quality of life.

Empowerment  The degree to which a person or community is empowered to do what they wish to do.

Culture is the common understanding or grouping of beliefs, values and practices in a society at a given moment in time. Culture is the sharing of ideas and habits that can manifest itself in religious doctrines, etiquette, cuisine, politics and speech. Ultimately, culture creates a social reality that guides our actions.

In my research on social impact, I uncovered the work of Bibb Lantané, a professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University. Professor Bibb Latané has authored more than 140 articles and books about his research on bystander intervention in emergencies, social impact and group influence, and other topics. In his studies, Lantané proposes that dynamic social impact exhibits itself in culture through regional clustering, correlations among cultural elements, consolidation of minorities, and continuing diversity.

The Lantané Dynamic Social Impact Theory is based on five principles: 1. Individuals differ. 2. Individuals have relatively stable locations in space. 3. Social influence is proportional to a multiplicative function of the strength, immediacy and number of sources. 4. The iterative, recursive outcome of individual influence processes will lead to the global self-organization of socially influenceable attributes and the emergence of group-level phenomena. 5. Social influence will be incremental for unimportant issues, catastrophic for important ones.

Lantané sums up that “Dynamic social impact theory views culture as a continuing human creation to which everyone contributes.” Culture is organic and constantly evolving through communication and social constructs.

How can organizations measure the impact on their local community?

Over the past decade, I have volunteered hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours to organizations who create local community events. Each of these events requires time and talents of hundreds of generous volunteers to make them a success. But as a volunteer, how can I be sure that I am putting my efforts in organizations that are making a positive impact on my community? And where do I go to look up other organizations in my area who are making a positive impact? What information is available to rate or evaluate organizational impact? And what does the community have to say about such events and the impact to their neighborhoods and their lives?

As an organization, how can community impact be measured? I believe that goes beyond just economic impact. It is greater than just the numbers of dollars invested and number of lives impacted.