Exploring Big Goal Projects

I am interested in exploring the idea of Big Goal projects (aka goal-oriented megaprojects). Substack crosspost here, and text copied below.

Exploring Big Goal Projects

When it comes to social change projects and social change giving - I believe both donors and program leaders are thinking WAY too small.

Today, a $10m program that has some impact for 1,000,000 people would quickly be labeled as a bold social change project. However, put another way, $10m is about 1/4 of 1% of the average billionaire’s wealth, and 1,000,000 people is about 1/10th of 1% of the world’s $1-a-day extreme poor.

In a world of astounding private sector achievements, it is hard to imagine a company being lauded as bold, for having some impact for 1/10th of 1% of their addressable market. In social change, we often have truly mediocre goals.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In a series of articles, I would like to make the case for “Big Goal projects” and correspondingly, “Big Goal giving” (giving directed to these projects). Big Goal projects aren’t merely big, they are also directed at a well-defined goal. An example of a big goal project I admire for example, is Coefficient Giving’s initiative to reduce the DALY burden of lead contamination in 50 countries - as opposed to a more traditional approach, which would find and support individual lead contamination organizations to grow incrementally.

Big Goal giving is of interest for very concrete and practical reasons. If structured well, they can have higher cost-effectiveness and lower risk per dollar.

1. A Big Goal project has potential to significantly increase effectiveness per dollar spent. Big Goal projects capture economies of scale, they are big enough to move significant levers like government and private sector, and often have long impact tails that extend into the future.
2. A Big Goal project can hold significantly less risk per dollar spent. Big Goal projects build a diversified-yet-targeted portfolio of complementary program activities, organizations, and geographies.

For donors and program leaders who wish to achieve maximum impact per dollar, it is worth paying attention to what aspects of a Big Goal project have potential to lead to increased cost-effectiveness and lowered risk.

In a series of articles, I aim to explore and hear critiques on:

• Four historical examples of Big Goal projects, and what we can learn from them.
• Contemporary examples of Big Goal projects, and what defining features make them likely to have higher impact per dollar - at lower risk - compared to pursuing local maxima.
• A very early theoretical roadmap of 100 future “Big Goal projects” that would be required to achieve meaningful gains in global equity in our lifetimes.
• Identifying psychological reasons for why we sometimes turn off our brains when thinking about social change, and therefore think too small - and ideas for how we can just get over ourselves.

Big Goals can be realistic

Sometimes discussion about Big Goals is rooted mostly in hype - but I believe my views are rooted in realism. I lived more than 10 years in rural East Africa, and helped to start and grow One Acre Fund, a 10,000 staff, $300m NGO that serves 6 million families. Our Big Goal is to help families we serve generate $1B in new profits and assets for farm families in 2030. To declare interest, I have now also co-founded Prevail, an organization that designs and launches Big Goal projects. In other words: as an informed and rational allocator of time, I have decided to spend all of my time at work only pursuing Big Goals at both organizations, because that’s what the people I serve demand.

I acknowledge that conventional wisdom in social change is that cost-effectiveness reduces after you have cherry-picked the strongest opportunities in a given field of work. If you’re looking at a spreadsheet or aiming for a local maxima, I can see why one might think that. However in the real world, I believe cost-effectiveness can improve with scale. In fact, this is how the private sector usually works - efficiency (dramatically) increases with scale. Here are two examples from my own experience and one from history:

• A typical One Acre Fund small country operation for example might generate only $2 in new farmer income per donor dollar - but often generates $6-$10 per donor dollar, after it has gotten large enough.
• At Prevail, our most cost-effective education grants are going to organizations reaching the most schools. Programs only working in a few school districts have lower impact per dollar, compared to organizations reaching their whole country. That’s why we’re supporting each organization we work with, to think bigger.
• In the next article, I will share four historical examples of big goal programs that generated long-lasting impacts. For example, Andrew Carnegie gave more than a billion dollars (in today’s equivalent) to build more than 1,000 public libraries. This big push has led to $14B+ in government spending on public libraries, per year, in the US alone. Whether or not you’re a fan of libraries, Carnegie got strong value for his money, by pursuing a big goal in a careful way.

Perhaps the most compelling reason for Big Goal projects: they are Big.

Maybe you won’t end up believing that well-structured bigger projects are more efficient. But even if so, the total scale of social change still matters! I believe the measure of humanity’s worth is how we treat our least-fortunate members. It doesn’t speak very well of humans when nearly a billion people barely subsist on less than $1 per day. Hundreds of millions of children regularly skip meals, many die before their fifth birthday, and are forced to leave school because they can’t afford even meager fees.

These problems are massive - why shouldn’t we attack these problems with our full creativity and ambition? This suffering is entirely needless: human society has excess resources that are likely hundreds of times more than required to achieve complete transformation. And we humans are clearly capable of accomplishing astounding things, as the private sector shows: today, there will be 100,000 commercial flights in the air! Could it be that we are simply failing in our lack of collective imagination when it comes to social change?

Let’s attack social change problems with a lot more boldness. Please join me on this shared learning journey - and I welcome your challenges and critiques.