Stanford University Our Voice Initiative
Organization
Stanford Our Voice is an initiative within Stanford’s School of Medicine which provides technology and resources for communities to improve the health of their local environments. Using the Our Voice Discovery Tool mobile app, community members document features of their environment that impact their ability to lead healthy lives. They then review their findings, prioritize areas for change, and promote improvements that will support community health.
Our Voice technologies and resources include:
- Our Voice Discovery Tool mobile app, Data Portal, and Project Management Dashboard
- Our Voice Toolkit – a library of materials to support implementation, evaluation and dissemination of Our Voice projects
- Training and consultation on project design, implementation and evaluation
- Membership in the Our Voice Global Network – a growing network of researchers and community practitioners
More than 40 Our Voice projects have been completed or are under way in the Bay Area, across the country, and in 19 different countries.
Situation
Having started with a $5,000 seed grant, the Our Voice Initiative ran for many years on a shoestring, establishing proof of concept, generating initial publications, and garnering a great deal of interest from community health researchers and practitioners from around the world. With additional funding from local foundations, Our Voice has built out its systems and technologies to support rapid, low-cost scale-up and built a global network of researchers and community-based practitioners who are promoting the impact of citizen science on health equity across a range of populations and health issues. Over the past several years, Our Voice has continued to run its own research programs, including a five-year NIH funded grant to look at the impact of Our Voice with groups of older adults in and around senior affordable housing sites. Given the explosion of interest in its work, Our Voice has an opportunity for much greater impact by scaling up the availability of its resources to additional researchers and organizations. There are currently more than 50 projects in the “exploration phase” across the US and globally.
Our Voice engaged Stanford ACT in the Fall of 2019 to create a pricing model so that they could begin generating earned income, with a goal of increasing funding for growth, expanding their impact, and eventually becoming self-sustaining.
Project Objectives
Develop a pricing structure for Our Voice products and services across several different types of research and community partner organizations worldwide.
Project Overview
The project consisted of a few major workstreams:
- Summary insights and detailed transcripts (anonymized if requested by partner) of ~15-20 partner interviews
- Summary of potential pricing models based on secondary research of similar offerings
- Recommended pricing structure for Our Voice products and services across several different types of research and community partner organizations worldwide
- Articulation of Our Voice value provided to each customer segment
Key Recommendations
The ACT team developed a pricing model for Our Voice so that they could begin generating earned income, with a goal of increasing funding for growth, expanding their impact, and eventually becoming self-sustaining. They are in process rolling out the new pricing model. As a next step, ACT helped structure a follow-on project to build a robust economic model for OV to better manage their operations as well as communicate to stakeholders and potential funders their viability as a business.