Visuals by Joan Encarnacion

Early in my career as a management consultant, I worked on a strategy project to increase life and accident insurance enrollment in underinsured, low-income communities.

Our team set off on its usual approach: analyzing prospective user groups, incomes, and spending habits to build a set of recommendations that would help our client sell insurance products in line with the community’s needs. The process was data-forward, revenue-focused, and rigorous, and after several months, we wrapped up the project with confidence.

When we checked in on their progress a year later, we were surprised to find that the strategy had not gone as planned: Our recommendations did not resonate with potential users, and ultimately, we had not addressed the challenge our client faced in reaching this community.

Looking back, the blindspot is obvious—the strategy completely lacked the pulse of the people. Numbers could only take us so far; people’s experiences were imperative to ensure product relevance and the economic mobility we were hoping to achieve.

The true challenge—and opportunity—was to extend our understanding beyond the familiar, to be curious and open to the stories we didn’t know, and to define use cases that truly reflect the realities of those we were trying to reach, not just our assumptions and narratives suggested by data. To uncover these critical details, we needed to immerse ourselves in their experiences and world.

This case led me to explore how to balance an organization’s commercial goals with truly addressing community needs when crafting a strategy. Over the years, I’ve worked with a range of organizations, helping define growth, operations, pricing strategies, and more, while experimenting with different combinations of analytical and human-centered approaches.

What I’ve learned is that achieving true market fit requires more than a single interview or a set of qualitative studies—it demands a deep understanding of lived experiences that aren’t immediately visible. When these needs are fully grasped, competitive advantage becomes clearer.

Through this journey, participatory strategies have become the cornerstone of my work—and here’s why they’re so effective.

Participatory Strategy: noun
/pärˈtisəpəˌtôrē/ /ˈstradəjē/

A strategy development approach in social impact that actively involves users, frontline staff, and external stakeholders in the decision-making process. Designed to align the needs of impacted communities with market dynamics and the organization’s unique strengths, participatory strategy focuses on creating inclusive, user-centered solutions that differentiate organizations and enhance their ability to achieve impact goals.

1. They Build Bolder Visions

If given one opportunity to transform life for your community, what might encourage you to think beyond a new and improved school for your neighborhood, but rather a revolutionary education system that meets the unique needs of students and their families?

This, in a nutshell, is what the participatory process does: it catalyzes big, bold ideas. It invites people and communities with lived experience to envision how their governments, service providers, and local organizations might transform their lives, encouraging them to dream up the futures they deserve. In turn, these visions push the partners we work with to consider the kind of world they want to shape with their services and funding and how they’re uniquely positioned to make it happen.

Each group is given permission to liberate themselves from everyday limitations, producing creative and future-fit outcomes. It sets the conditions to create new stories worth living into and products that better meet market needs.

In a recent project with a national nonprofit focused on justice reform, IDEO.org developed a strategy for their new portfolio focused on creating economic pathways for justice-impacted individuals. To conceive of paradigm-shifting possibilities, we asked justice-impacted individuals, prospective employers, and organizations dedicated to justice reform to illustrate what economic freedom and a supportive labor market would look like.

The team painted a picture of a strategic vision we called a “Second Chance City,” illustrating how fair chance hiring could look when fully integrated into a city’s economic development agenda through a place-based approach. This vision, in turn, helped the organization and our team design a strategy with clear strategic imperatives. Exemplified by a place-based initiative launched this year in Chicago, the approach widens the aperture of impact beyond what the organization could have achieved on its own.

2. They Inform Better Choices

In its simplest form, a strategy is a series of choices an organization makes to achieve its desired impact.

Where a traditional strategy is built upon the choices made almost exclusively by the C-suite, a participatory strategy brings community members in at tactical moments to weigh in with their expertise. At these junctures, quantitative reasoning is complimented with qualitative insights leading to better informed decisions.

In 2022, IDEO.org began working with a coalition of funders in New Jersey to advance equitable maternal healthcare and wellness by expanding the workforce of community doulas. A cohort of doulas came onto the project as our co-designers advising us on our strategy for the new program, providing invaluable insights into the day-to-day reality of their roles and the underinsured clients that they serve.

At the onset of the project, one of the decisions we needed to make was how to best approach education for the next generation of doulas. The coalition of funders believed that a full-time community college course–one of several goals in the strategy–was necessary to certify community doulas. Our co-designers, however, emphasized that an apprenticeship program, where participants could work while learning, would be far more effective in attracting Black and Brown talent because of its accessibility.

Involving our community of doula co-designers to provide input on actionable initiatives helped ground the strategy, making it more practical and realistic. By inviting affected communities to contribute to decision-making at key moments, funders and organizations can effectively test-drive their choices and gain greater confidence in the decisions they ultimately make.

3. They Translate Unpproachable Ideas Through Stories

A strategy is like a story; it has a central challenge, a cast of characters, and a journey towards growth. Instead of relying on numbers and charts, a participatory process helps bring the story to life through the stories and experiences of people.

These personal insights are key to finding the verbal and visual expressions that honor their realities. By enriching data with powerful narratives and compelling imagery, we create something that stakeholders can truly connect with and support, turning an otherwise unapproachable strategy into a shared journey.

In 2022, we partnered with a family trust to design a strategy for under and uninsured individuals living with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D). For this community, basic care and affordable insulin were often out of reach, and competing priorities made managing care difficult. Consequently, their health outcomes were hanging by a thread. The strategy aimed to position our partner as a safety net for this community.

Many described living without a safety net; if one thing went wrong, they would fall through the holes of a fraying healthcare system.

The analogy, a tapestry of care, became central to our strategy. By repairing this fractured tapestry through more affordable, accessible, welcoming, and holistic care, we envisioned a future where underinsured individuals could live healthier, more secure lives. This metaphor—still in use today—helped the family trust understand how the program components fit together and conveyed the challenges these communities face with respect and depth.

For philanthropists, this approach is particularly powerful. By clearly telling the story, it inspires others to take the movement forward, creating broader support and amplifying the initiative's impact.

Smarter Strategies in a Changing Landscape

In today’s world of philanthropy and social impact, where organizations are competing for funding and rethinking their priorities post-COVID, strategies need to do more than just align with what an organization can do. They have to stand out by showing a clear path to impact that wins funding, while also building partnerships that bring organizations together to achieve shared goals. Participatory strategies don’t just strengthen individual efforts—they help amplify collective impact.

By creating strategies grounded in the real experiences of the communities we serve, we develop solutions that are both sustainable and scalable. These approaches build trust, attract partners, and ensure that the work is meaningful, measurable, and built to last. In a world with limited resources, collaboration and leveraging diverse voices aren’t just valuable—they’re essential for making lasting change.