Thrive is now live! Impact versus outputs

The new Thrive Networks website is up: www.thrivenetworks.org.

It's a whole new approach to our work. Check out the impact tab/publications. We are moving away from counting outputs, and instead are examining impact, defined as permanent and meaningful change. For example, our neonatal health program treats 55,000 babies a year, which is fine. That's an output. Better is to look for the effects on neonatal mortality and morbidity. How many lived who otherwise would have died? How many were saved from brain damage caused by severe jaundice? What is the mortality rate in the hospital before and after the intervention? These are the questions that we are asking and answering.

Launching Thrive Networks

When the world changes, you have to change with it. Twenty-six years ago, Vietnam was just emerging from the dark years of socialist austerity and international isolation. Today, it is a development success story with a burgeoning middle class and a booming economy. Good for the Vietnamese people, but 26 years ago East Meets West was the only NGO game in town. Today, there are over 1,000 international organizations registered to work in the country. So we decided to re-launch East Meets West as Thrive Networks and seek our fortunes in the rest of the world (without leaving Vietnam behind, not by a long shot).

This was not an easy or quick decision; it took years of hard strategic planning work. But we started from the very beginning with a focus on transformation, not just change. We exhumed all our assumptions, aired out our values, cast a critical eye on favored programs, and looked out around the world to see what we thought was fresh, innovative, challenging and needed.

This led us to realize that a lot of innovation was happening in the rapidly-growing NGO sector, but most of these groups were really struggling to reach scale. We also came to believe that the era of helping low-income people with basic needs was over, and it was time to focus on low-opportunity individuals and communities and figure out ways to help them not just survive, but thrive. So we set up Thrive Networks to find great partners with innovative solution-oriented programs, and invite them to join with us to reach as many people as possible.

The board of directors voted in late 2013 to approve this strategy, and in February 2014 to change the name to Thrive Networks. This has led to a fantastic new organizational energy, with lots of new partners, three mergers completed, and more to come. We also learned a lot of lessons about how to do it right. Being a good American, as Churchill once noted, I try to do things correctly, but only after exploring every other option first. So we made some big mistakes along the way.

I'll share those in another post. And on Friday, our new website goes live -- with a big new section devoted to providing real insight into our performance. There is a lot to be proud of, but we don't shy away from telling the truth. Indeed, much of our work is now reviewed and verified by third parties.

Stay posted!

John