Societal problem

With a labor force participation rate of only 20.4%, people living with disabilities in Florida face a huge employment gap compared to their peers without disabilities. There is an unacceptable lack of inclusion in the state’s workforce, despite over 500,000 unfilled job opportunities.

The Able Trust is a non-profit organization on a mission to transform employment inclusion for Floridians with disabilities and ensure that all people have the same rights and opportunities. Set up by the Florida legislature, the organization’s remit includes identifying research-based solutions, and working in partnership with the state government to fund, scale, and fully implement these solutions.

Mission

The Able Trust recognized that addressing the enormous gap in workforce inclusion for people with disabilities would require innovative solutions and collaborative strategies, but did not know where to focus their efforts to achieve maximum impact at scale.

The team turned to Spring Impact for help with using the Lean Impact methodology as a way to hypothesize, test, and iterate scalable solutions to the challenges and barriers within Florida’s vocational rehabilitation and disability employment systems.

Action

“Lean Impact is simple in its methodology, but once you dive in, there is an art to knowing where and how to move forward, to knowing when to iterate or when to pivot. Having Spring Impact not only coach us but challenge the way we approach critical intersections was invaluable.” – Leanne Rexford, Director of Strategic Initiatives

Using the Lean Impact approach – our methodology that helps teams move from a big audacious goal to small experiments that create sustainable and scalable solutions faster – Spring Impact helped The Able Trust define a viable pathway to scale up quality employment disability outcomes across Florida, starting with mapping the larger system and identifying opportunities for The Able Trust to maximize impact.

In partnership with Spring Impact, The Able Trust developed a disability employment network with a viable hypothesis for:

• Value for key system players, including employers, the Florida Division Vocational Rehabilitation, and employment support service providers
• Impact: potential to transform the quality of employment outcomes for people living with disabilities throughout the state by brokering relationships between employers and employment support service providers.
• Scale: a financial model that recovers all network costs through funding beyond philanthropic dollars

Spring Impact coached The Able Trust through over 10 experiments to test the value proposition and channel strategy for employers and employment support service providers, as well as the impact of the disability employment network.

Impact

Getting better results, faster

“Working with Spring Impact has not only helped us clarify our goals and refine in some instances, it has helped us learn how to work toward answers and spend a lot less time figuring out which directions will work (or not work).” – Tracey Lowe, Strategic Communications Director

In just a few months, The Able Trust improved their value proposition and approach to recruit new employment support service providers into the disability employment network from 40% success rates to over 90% success rates. The team has further:

• Improved their value proposition and approach to bring employers who have hiring needs into the network, from 15% success rates to over 35%
• Revised their pricing structure and payer model to ensure the Network is financially sustainable
• Revamped their communications strategy, including newsletters to prospective employers and employment support service providers, increasing click-through rates on newsletters 10-fold
• Identified and overcame countless barriers to the network’s success at scale

Ultimately, The Able Trust developed a viable new scale pathway and gathered robust data through lean experiments that helped the team adjust and refine their model for impact at scale.

Embedding Lean Impact internally for continuous learning

“This has turned out even better than I ever expected. It’s important to use this method so that we make sure we are using our resources, including our time and efforts, effectively. We are changing. We are trying new things. We don’t always know if it’s the right solution, and Lean Impact is helping us figure that out. Some of the things that I thought for sure were going to be the right solutions weren’t. And we changed and iterated.” – Allison Chase, President & CEO

The Able Trust team is now trained and comfortable with the end-to-end Lean Impact process, including designing lean experiments to validate key risks and assumptions, building minimum viable products, testing with constituents, and using the resulting data to iterate on their solutions and scale strategies.

The team institutionalized Lean Impact into their culture, staff model, and ways of working, setting up weekly Lean Impact team meetings to continue progressing experiments, analyzing learnings, and improving their work.

Working with Spring Impact helped The Able Trust clarify their goals, refine their approach, and spend less time and crucial resources figuring out which directions will work, ultimately leading to better results and a culture of continuous learning.