Social Impact Model - Contraceptives

This is the first edition to a series that I’m starting where I’ll be publishing Social Impact Models to help businesses think more carefully about the social value created by each one of their charitable donations. It should also be noted that the concentration of these models will be on large donations ($50k+). These models will all look to answer one question: for every dollar donated, how much measurable benefit could the donation create for society?

The model in this case evaluates a voluntary contraceptive-access program. A user begins by entering information such as the size of the donation, the number of people the program expects to serve, the share of participants who are likely to use the service, and how long they are expected to receive effective contraceptive protection. From there, the model estimates outcomes such as the number of effective users, additional contraceptive-years created, and unintended pregnancies that may be prevented or postponed.

Those outcomes are then translated into several categories of social value. These include potential healthcare savings, improvements in maternal health, education and earnings benefits, improved birth spacing, and the value of greater personal autonomy. The model then takes into account possible side effects like weak implementation, and the risk of counting the same benefit more than once and deducts those costs accordingly.

Since this isn’t an exact science, instead of there being a single “Net Social Value of Donation”, three scenarios will populate: a conservative, base, and optimistic scenario. This is important because many of the inputs are uncertain and can vary significantly depending on factors like the target country of the program, the experience of the particular charity at hand implementing a program like this, and more. The dashboard shows the estimated gross social benefit per dollar, net social value per dollar, pregnancies averted, and other key results.

I don’t see this model or others like it as a tool that produces a perfect or universal measure of social good, but they emerge as useful nonetheless. Its purpose is to make the assumptions behind a corporate donation decision clearer and more transparent, giving companies greater confidence in the expected impact of their contributions and, ideally, encouraging them to donate more often and in larger amounts.