The Agency Fund

Attending the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference next year? Join the Intervention Science Preconference. The event will dig into the theory and evidence behind groundbreaking interventions, highlight new data, and create opportunities to workshop some of the common challenges affecting intervention research. And in partnership with the organizers, we're delighted to announce a $10k research award for psychological scientists developing innovative research and interventions to expand human agency, particularly for the most marginalized. Applications for the award will open in November, with the winner announced at the pre-conference in Denver. 🔎 Find out more about pre-conferences: https://lnkd.in/d5VYZtHJ

To develop approaches that work in complex contexts, organizations need to continuously test, learn, and adapt. In our latest blog, Strategy Fellow Ishaan Bansal dives into the "test-and-learn" approach that powers user-centered innovation. By centering beneficiaries’ experiences and iterating based on real-time feedback, social sector organizations can make informed decisions that reflect the needs of the communities they support. Using tools like A/B testing, user personas, and journey mapping, plenty of organizations are already uncovering insights that drive real impact—whether it’s improving user engagement, enhancing program retention, or tailoring services to better meet community needs. And as data technology continues to develop, we have the opportunity to do even more. By embedding experimentation and continuous learning, organizations can refine and scale their programs, meeting complex challenges with agility. Testing isn’t just a step in the process; it’s how we achieve some immediate impact while preparing to be even more impactful in future. How are you using “test-and-learn” methods in your work? Read the blog and share your thoughts in the comments. 🔗 Full blog here: https://lnkd.in/g5DeYMp8 Harvard University The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

Where Can AI Add Value in Career Development Coaching? 🚀 A new white paper by Sarah Shaw and Abby Lupi evaluates Coach, an AI-powered career tool from CareerVillage.org. While not an RCT, the study offers valuable early signals on how AI can enhance career readiness. ✅ Most learners reported their CVs, cover letters, and interview skills were employment-ready after using Coach. 🧑🎓 In a pilot with Generation.org, 81% found the tool effective for employability coaching. 🤝 90% of participants preferred a mix of AI and human coaching, showing that AI works best alongside mentors—saving time on tasks like resumé writing and freeing mentors to focus on personalized support. Here are some of our takeaways: 1️⃣ AI for Workforce Efficiency: Coach demonstrates that automating tasks like resumé building allows mentors to focus on personalized guidance. This points to AI’s potential to optimize resources and make workforce interventions scalable. 2️⃣ Blended Support as the Future Standard: Learners’ preference for hybrid coaching reflects a trend where AI augments human support, rather than replacing it, positioning AI as a key enabler of deeper, more impactful mentoring. 3️⃣ Adaptive Coaching Through Data: The ability to track mindset changes over time highlights how AI can deliver real-time feedback, refining interventions continuously and tailoring support to individual learners' journeys. 4️⃣ Democratizing Access to Guidance: AI tools like Coach show promise in reducing barriers for underrepresented learners, making career development support more accessible at scale and fostering more equitable workforce outcomes. The insights from Coach offer exciting new directions for AI in career development. To learn more, explore the full paper and join the conversation on the future of career readiness! 🔗 Full paper here: https://lnkd.in/gRwN5CJM

There's a ton of psychological research that tells us people respond better to stories than to raw statistics. When information is presented to us through role models — people like us navigating contexts like ours — we're more likely to take it onboard when we make decisions. But how do we operationalize that knowledge? Supreet Kaur, Associate Professor, Berkeley Economics, University of California, Berkeley, is testing an approach that uses locally-sourced media content in the State of Punjab to boost the efficacy of public health interventions on drug use. Learn more ⬇

In the social sector, we often talk about putting people at the center of development. But how do we design processes that deliver on that promise? In our latest blog, Strategy Fellow Ishaan Bansal explores how user-centered design can fuel successful innovation, by ensuring beneficiaries' needs, experiences and feedback shape key decisions. This drives organizations to grow in ways that genuinely respond to the communities they support. At our recent sprint in Bangalore, we heard from partners who are applying these processes and achieving results, using tools like user personas, journey maps, and A/B testing to drive growth. For instance, when @Rocket Learning tweaked their naming conventions through A/B testing, they boosted user retention by 26%. By embedding user-centered innovation and continued learning, organizations can improve programming as they scale, adapting and iterating to reflect complex real-world needs. Experimentation isn't a box to check—it's how we achieve some impact today while learning to be even more impactful tomorrow. How are you integrating user-focused innovation into your work? Read the full blog here and share your thoughts in the comments: https://lnkd.in/gr89myWh

CLOSING SOON: The Agency Fund open call for grant funding There’s just one week left to respond to our latest open call for applications for grant funding. The closing date is Thursday, October 31st at 11.59PM Pacific Time. We anticipate having at least $1 million in awards available in this round to support exciting and innovative projects that align with our mission and values. We want to hear from you, if you have a project that: ➡ will engage more than 1,000 users ➡ will help people update their beliefs, perspectives, or mental models; and have a way to demonstrate this ➡ will measure outcomes for users, and a comparison group of non-users, to estimate impact ➡ will work to reach over 1 million people by 2030 🔗 Apply here by October 31st: https://lnkd.in/gcUNwVre Know any organizations that should apply? Tag them in the comments. #FundingOpportunity

If we think of life as an ocean journey, agency is how we navigate the ship. We don't always get the luxury of calm waters or a safe harbor. Most of the time, we're out at sea and exposed to all sorts of hazards. Shallow rocks, sea sickness and storms. Ill health, crop failure, financial hardship. For millennia, sailors have relied on detailed readings of their surroundings to plot their courses, even when conditions are tough. Similarly, we aim to equip people with the beliefs and mental models they need to achieve their goals — especially when things get stormy. Patricia Andrews Fearon explains how the craft of navigation can help us unpack agency ⬇

What does it take to deploy an agency-based intervention in a new context? In June this year, Jacaranda Health secured a partnership with eHealth Africa to test its SMS-based AI-powered health tool, PROMPTS, with 25,000 expectant mothers in Kano State, Nigeria. In Kenya, nearly two and a half million expectant mothers have subscribed to PROMPTS and preliminary RCT results show positive effects in that context, across the pregnancy and post-partum period. To prepare for the Nigerian pilot, the teams are taking the following steps to prime PROMPTS for expansion to a new setting: ➡Extending the customized LLM, which underpins PROMPTS, to converse in Hausa and Yoruba. ➡Customizing the PROMPTS helpdesk to better classify language and context-specific questions from mothers and collecting specific data (via SMS surveys) on their experience of care in the facilities they visit. ➡Introducing content to address context-specific challenges, such as localized yet widespread pregnancy-related myths and misconceptions. ➡Adding additional malaria-focused content, given the disease’s high prevalence in Kano State. ➡Gathering information from Community Health Extension Workers on the needs and experiences of mothers in this setting, which will inform further messaging adaptations. Following from the pilot, the goal is to expand PROMPTS to reach an additional 100,000 Nigerian mothers in the following year and over 1.5 million mothers in the next three years. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gahdZn-v

A crucial part of living an agentic life is the ability to set adaptive goals for ourselves. But to what extent is an individual's decision-making driven by people’s own goals and values, VERSUS external pressures? In a new working paper, Aletheia Donald and colleagues attempt to capture this with a Relative Autonomy Index (RAI), which measures where people's motivation lies, on a spectrum from self-driven goals to socially-driven obligations. Working with rural households in the Philippines, the team found that for many farming families, and especially for women, decisions are often shaped by external factors. Poverty can force them to make choices based on immediate pressures rather than personal aspirations. Lack of accessible resources limits their choices about what crops to plant. And social norms may lead them to defer to their husbands on major decisions rather than making agentic choices. The researchers contend that agency, as measured by the RAI, is about more than holding a formal decision-making title, and that agency measures and interventions should reflect that. 📖 Read the full paper here: https://lnkd.in/g5FeCizM 

📢 EVENT: The Global Digital Health Forum is coming to Nairobi from 4-6 December. Bringing together industry, government, researchers, donors and social sector organizations, the GDHF aims to map a way forward on key public health challenges. There will be sessions on AI, climate and health, data management, community-level digital transformation and more. If you're not in Nairobi, the conference is continuing its hybrid approach in 2024 and you can register to attend online: https://www.gdhf.digital/ Who’s going? 🙌