Joe McCannon, campaign manager for the 100,000 Lives
Campaign, was invited to a meeting in 2009 with a group that wanted to learn
about the work he had done. Group
members were interested in doing something similar around homelessness. With the success of the 100,000 Lives
Campaign, many organizations outside of healthcare had been approaching McCannon
and he was excited to apply what his campaign had learned to other areas. He attended the meeting with Margiotta and
Haggerty, sharing, “I just remember leaving and saying, you know, I’ve got to
work on that. I don’t care if I have to do it on nights and weekends, I have to
help with that.”
Joe McCannon Talks About Joining the 100,000 Homes Campaign (1:35)
McCannon wound up working in partnership with Margiotta for about six months to design the 100,000 Homes Campaign. Based on the slogan of 100,000 Lives founder Don Berwick, who said that “some is not a number and soon is not a time," they set a measurable goal with a deadline.
Margiotta solicited input from the communities that were already piloting Street to Home. McCannon noted how she was able to solidify their support: "We’re giving you a chance to be part of a once-in-a-lifetime initiative, you can be a part of the design team for this thing that is going to change the country. 'Do you want to be a part of that?' Who’s going to say no to that?"
McCannon introduced the idea of a driver diagram and
helped Margiotta develop one for the 100,000 Homes Campaign. It was in essence a one-page strategic map that, according to
Margiotta, “was like having a crystal ball.” The diagram was based on the key behaviors that McCannon had identified
from the 100,000 Lives Campaign as well as back-of-the-envelope analyses.
The back-of-the-envelope analysis helped identify which cities to target to reach the goal. The team
put together a map of the United States, highlighting the 55 cities with 1,000 or more homeless people. "The
rest was basically 'we want those 55 cities. We’ll take all comers, but Sarasota, Florida, we’re coming after you.'"
To accomplish such a large task in a relatively short amount of time, McCannon emphasized that the campaign culture had to be based on:
Joe McCannon Talks About Creating a Culture for the 100,000 Homes Campaign (1:38)
McCannon and Margiotta also drew from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, about changing behavior by simultaneously appealing to people’s analytical and emotional reasoning as well as by shaping their environment. That was the impetus behind the before and after video the Campaign team developed.
100,000 Homes Campaign: Before and After Video (3:00)
To capture all that they had learned and to provide direction, Margiotta and her team succinctly outlined the key tenets around which the campaign would be built. This information was posted on the Campaign website and highlighted in trainings and getting started toolkits:
Prior to working with McCannon to design the campaign, Margiotta had been traveling around the country with Sandor, helping various cities conduct registry weeks. She and Sandor continued this outreach, prototyping the registry week intervention “all the way up until when the campaign launched.”
The registry weeks were exhausting. Margiotta and Sandor were constantly traveling somewhere new to get up at 3:00 am to do an activity with volunteers—often in a dark, frightening part of a strange town. They would then spend the day entering the data, barely getting to sleep before 9:00 pm, only to wake up again at 3:00 am. This lasted for a couple days in a row. On Fridays, they would prepare a community briefing, which usually was attended by local officials such as the mayor. The goal was to be compelling and provide an emotional catalyst for the community transformation. According to Margiotta, "Beth and I did almost all of those together and we thought nobody but us could do it right."
The two quickly learned that other people could indeed do registry weeks effectively. According to Margiotta, "People [in the community] did better registry weeks than we did. It was a really humbling thing…you’ve got to let go of thinking that you’re the only person who can do it right."
Margiotta recounted, “We showed up in San Diego and we walked in the room and thought, ‘oh, wow, that’s very organized. That’s actually much better than we would have done ourselves.’” They negotiated a contract to have the San Diego organizer codify the material and create a training notebook for the campaign.
Each month Community Solutions asked participating communities to report the number of chronically or vulnerable homeless people placed into permanent housing. These monthly statistics were the primary metric the Campaign used to track progress.
The Housing Placement Rate was determined by dividing the number of people placed into permanent housing each month from a baseline number of chronically or vulnerable homeless people in the community.