3. Channels/Pathways

Channels and pathways are how your innovation gets to your target. They represent the specific links between your organization and the people you hope to serve, influence, or change. The channel can be physical (NMAI is an actual facility that real people visit every day); written/spoken (Smarter, Cleaner, Stronger relied on written reports delivered to thought leaders); or virtual (Catalog Choice reached people online for their selections). The choice of which pathways or channels you will use to drive change is critical.

The first channel to list is the one closest at hand. As you launch your innovation, you will be speaking with lots of targets in the next two steps. The way you plan on reaching those folks (online, door-to-door, structured interviews, casual visits) is your first channel.

The converse is to make sure to think about the biggest channels you could use. You’ll be speaking with lots of people as you get started in the next few weeks, and what you learn from them, their interest in adopting your innovation, will be exciting. But face-to-face interviews and interactions are just one channel to impact. Don’t get so caught up in the immediate that you neglect the truly scalable channels that you might develop.

In 2002, my colleagues and I started something called the Climate Justice Corps to train young people to fight global warming based particularly in communities at the front line of impacts. We recruited from schools around the country and for the next few years trained ten to twelve young people per year. Our goal was to give communities of color a voice in the climate debate, and our channel was to work through our corps members directly with communities. By the program’s third year, we realized that we had the potential to train thousands of young people by shifting to a multilevel marketing model. Unfortunately, we had come to this realization too late, and our training costs of upward of $10,000 per student for a summer eventually dragged the program down. Since then, other organizations, notably the Alliance for Climate Education, have adopted that model and reached over a million young people to date.

So make sure to put some really big ideas for channels on the Lean Change Canvas as well, because there’s nothing worse than going down a successful pathway that, at the end of the day and with a lot of effort, just doesn’t get to the scale needed by the challenge you are addressing.

Channels in the business sector can be diverse but are limited by the fact that they are all about collecting revenue from customers. Untethered from this requirement, social sector channels can be designed with great creativity. I won’t attempt to create a typology here, but consider factors like:

• Are you charging for your service or product? Do you have to design the channel to collect revenue, to be self-funded, to use a sliding scale, to be subsidized, or to use some other pricing mechanism?

• Do your targets come to you, as on a blog or in a museum, or do you go to them, as in door-to-door organizing?

• Is your service “self-serve,” through your website or online service, for example, or direct, as in when you deliver the product or service directly yourselves?

• Are referrals an important part of your channel strategy? Do you need your targets to be enthusiasts, evangelists?

Remember, you will likely start with direct contact with your targets. All these other channels will come later. Their success will be built on understanding exactly what works for the people you are trying to reach. That early hands-on emphasis is critical to testing your innovation and reaching a great outcome. Only when you understand the granular appeal of your innovation will you truly start exploring channels and pathways that allow for rapid growth in your impact. Table 4.3 shows sample entries for the Channels/Pathways box for each of our case studies.