An article in the Harvard Business Review highlighted a phenomenon that gives something an individual had a hand in creating more value than the identical or better something not created by our own hand. Dubbed the Ikea Effect, because of that company's model requiring most of its products to be assembled by the consumer, it is an argument for the value of engagement strategies, which seek to develop campaigns, products and services from the input of the people likely to use and promote them.

Nonprofits and advocacy organizations are still struggling with how to open their work to their constituents and supporters, and will continue to as long as professional staff are paid for creating and implementing campaigns, rather than engaging communities.

I read an article called "The Dynamics of Personal Influence" in the Harvard Business Review recently which highlights studies done to show the range of personal influence over others. The study looked at trends such as smoking and being happy, and found that if you do those things it is likely that those within three degrees removed from you also do those things. In other words, if you report being happy, your friends and their friends and their friends are more likely to be happy. If you smoke, the same--your friends, and their friends, and their friends are also likely to smoke. The percentage decreases as the influence fans across the degrees of connection, until the fourth degree (your friends, friends' friends' friend) no longer has a higher likelihood of your behavior or habits.

This article talks about the implications that this might bring to sell more products or jump start creativity and innovation within a corporate setting. To me it brings up advocacy and personal implications. Think about how many people you know. And then how many people they know. And when you total the number of people that you can influence through these three degrees, the average person is likely to have influence over tens of thousands of people. So what do we want tens of thousands of people to do? It really makes the words of Gandhi ring true: We must be the change we want to see in the world. The notion of three degrees of personal influence really made me think about mundane things like my facebook status updates totally differently.

EngagingDiabetes.com is a new project I'm involved in to collect information directly from people with diabetes in order to design new web, mobile phone and social network tools for better disease management and health outcomes. If you have diabetes, please take a few minutes to participate in a confidential online survey. If you know someone with diabetes, please pass it along to them. Click Here to take survey