Become a Driver of Impact Learning

I pointed out in my previous post in Markets for Good that we now have the technology to seed an impact sharing economy, not unlike Uber and Lyft, where every service organization, funder, capacity builder, intermediary and researcher can serve as an impact learning “driver”.

Our new Impact Learning Technology is best explained in this 2-minute Video:

When organizations join a field-specific iLearning System, they are engaging in a rapidly growing shared impact measurement community, where it is finally possible to “drive” their own impact learning. These “organizational learning drivers” are our first type of impact driver.

In addition to providing beneficiary insights to individual organizations, the iLearning System can provide just-in-time standardized, aggregated data and insights to funders, impact investors, capacity builders, collaborative leaders, evaluators, researchers, and other intermediaries. These “collective learning drivers” can use group and/or community-level data and insights to dig deeper into what works across groups and systems, and help create or improve upon strategies and solutions in order to more rapidly scale success.

It is critical to understand that our technology isn’t “doing” and can never “do” the collective work; only people can make meaning, plan and act! It is simply a tool that seeds unified learning, making it possible for everyone with a common purpose to be on the same measurement and learning page as they join forces to do the hard work of making the world a better place.

Become a Youth Development Learning Driver

Algorhythm’s bold goal is to seed the largest organically grown learning network of youth development organizations and communities, from the ground up. We plan on engaging at least 250 nonprofit organizations in a cohort of beta learners. Every beta testing organization will have the benefit of learning from a dataset of tens of thousands of youth, who are each confidentially sharing their program experience and how their lives have changed. Following the launch, we hope to engage thousands of youth development organizations everywhere, learning from hundreds of thousands of youth, perhaps even millions, in real time.

We are taking a crowd sourcing, crowd sponsoring and crowd supporting approach to achieving this goal. As I already noted, our technology cannot plan and implement a learning movement; it simply plants a shared set of learning seeds. The role of an iLearning System is to cost-effectively streamline and enhance standardized beneficiary assessment, impact measurement, analysis and reporting processes for organizational and community leaders. Then, it is these community leaders, not our technology, who are in by far the best position to facilitate the context-specific meaning making, planning, designing, implementing and course correcting.

Algorhythm is trying to democratize the power of impact measurement and learning by making an iLearning System affordable for any impact driver. For most organizations, a subscription to the Youth Development iLearning System costs between $250 and $3,000, depending on how many youth are being served. And, for the early adopters who are willing to join us for the beta launch of the YD iLearning System, Algorhythm is providing a 50% discount as a way of saying thanks in advance for being a supportive learning partner and tester of new features.

How to Become a Youth Development Learning Driver

Here are a few spark ideas for becoming a youth development learning driver (and if you are not working in the field of youth development, share this information with those who are and/or reach out to us to tell us that you are interested in seeding a new field’s iLearning System):

1. If you are a youth development organization, become a member of the YD iLearning System and encourage other youth development organizations to do so as well. Also, consider becoming a “collective learning driver” by inviting a group of peer organizations into a self-directed learning group.
2. If you are a youth development grantmaker or impact investor, sponsor your grantees’/investees’ membership in the YD iLearning System, encourage other grantmakers or investors to do so, and consider supporting a group of grantees to engage in a collective learning experience. Grantmakers and impact investors can receive group-level findings reports, including benchmarked findings, lessons and insights.
3. If you are a youth development program or organizational capacity builder, reach out to your clients to provide learning and strategy support, leveraging iLearning System findings and insights as a part of the process.
4. If you are a part of a youth development federation, association or membership organization, let members know about the opportunity, consider supporting group learning experiences, and/or consider accessing system-level iLearning System data as an additional policy and practice resource for your research and dissemination efforts.
5. If you are a youth development evaluator, consider adding iLearning System data collection tools and technology, data and findings to your methodology and processes, including incorporating findings into your participatory and empowerment experiences.

Become a Youth Development “Organizational Learning Driver”: If you want to become a youth development impact driver, sign up and watch our pre-recorded orientation webinar, here.

“Algorhythm is trying to democratize the power of impact measurement.”

Become a Youth Development “Collective Learning Driver”: If you are a funder, collective leader, association/federation leader, capacity builder or evaluator serving the youth development field, join us by signing up, here, for our March 18^th webinar that will detail how Algorhythm and the iLearning System can support your collective work, projects and initiatives.

Help Us Build iLearning Systems in Other Fields of Practice

Algorhythm crowd funds and crowd sources the build of our field-specific iLearning Systems. As we did with our YD iLearning System, we begin our “alpha” builds by conducting a rigorous pilot study involving many organizations within a field of practice. This study is crowd funded and crowd sourced by pooling the resources of funders and organizations. These pilot studies are less expensive than a typical cohort evaluation; produce organizational and group deliverables of beneficiary findings for all involved; and are leveraged to create the beginning dataset and analytic models to serve the beta build of the iLearning System. During these alpha builds, we invite capacity builders, researchers and intermediaries to inform the design of an iLearning System, and co-lead on figuring out how best to support the work of impact learning drivers, everywhere.

If you would like to support the alpha build of a field-specific iLearning System, please contact us at: info@algorhythm.io. If you would like to learn more about Algorhythm’s philosophy, approach, analytics and technology, go to http://algorhythm.io, and watch our “Behind the Scenes” video.

Many thanks to Peter York for sharing his new initiative and inviting the Markets For Good community to be involved. Be sure to follow him on Twitter for further updates, and you can sign up to the iLearning webinar on March 18th here.

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