What the Vikings can teach us about fighting poverty

Minnesota has consistently been recognized as among the most charitable states in America, a noteworthy distinction that should make us all proud. When it comes to poverty alleviation, though, our good intentions have not yielded great results.

In the Twin Cities alone, the proportion of people living in poverty has risen by 60% over the past two decades, with communities of color bearing the brunt of this appalling trend. You are nearly six times more likely to be poor in our community if you are Black than if you are white, the largest such disparity of any major metropolitan area in the nation.

How can one of the most charitable states be home to some of the worst inequities? The answer extends well beyond charity, but this unacceptable juxtaposition represents an opportunity to rethink our approach to philanthropy. And we should look to an unlikely source for inspiration: the Minnesota Vikings.

The Vikings recently charted a new course by hiring a general manager, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, who joins the team with a nontraditional football résumé, having earned degrees in economics and worked on Wall Street before rising through the NFL. During his first news conference in Minnesota, Adofo-Mensah underscored his bona fides as a "football guy" while also emphasizing the centrality of analytics to his approach, citing a mind-set of "process over results."

The subtext was clear: An analytical process has a better chance of producing results on the field.

Whether Adofo-Mensah brings a championship to Minnesota remains to be seen, but what we heard about his approach should sound familiar. In fact, you may have seen the movie.

In 2002, the Oakland A's baseball team began to rethink the game by building algorithms to complement the opinions of professional scouts and find hidden value in overlooked players. The result was an ending fit for Hollywood, with the small-market A's propelled to the playoffs in a season that was later immortalized in the book "Moneyball" and the Oscar-winning film by the same name.

Oakland's innovations have since been widely adopted across professional sports, but they have not yet changed the game in a field with much more at stake: addressing poverty.

I know this from my own experience. I was born into privilege. So, for reasons I cannot take credit for, I have had the honor of sitting down with countless nonprofits, each of which must compete for funds based on their ability to access and persuade well-resourced individuals like me. In every case, I walk away from those meetings feeling inspired by the meaningful, selfless work being conducted.

But I also walk away feeling ill-equipped to make an informed decision. Without the ability to compare the effectiveness of one organization to another, I have been left to rely on my own intuition, contextual knowledge and personal relationships to steer my giving.

But with 1 in 5 residents of the Twin Cities living in poverty, a charitable mind-set of "doing good" is simply not good enough. Low-income individuals and families deserve access to services that can help them break the cycle of poverty, yet decisions about which programs get funding are often tied to the opinions of people like me.

It doesn't have to be this way. By complementing our own perspectives with the full power of analytics — synthesizing insights from research, local demographic information, nonprofit data and more — we can harness a more impactful approach to poverty alleviation.

Philanthropy has made strides in this direction. In addition to crucial new efforts around community engagement, many funders are using data to inform grantmaking decisions. But too often this data represents the outputs of our social sector — the number of people served — and not the long-term outcomes for individuals and families experiencing poverty.

If you are getting surgery at the Mayo Clinic, you don't just want to know how many operations your surgeon has performed, you want to know how they turned out. Modern analytics can get us closer to understanding outcomes, yet local sports teams continue to employ vastly more powerful analytical tools to fill their rosters than we as a community use to address complex challenges like poverty.

It is worth noting that the evidence-driven approach making its way to U.S. Bank Stadium is rooted in long-established science. And, as it turns out, in Minnesota.

In 1954, Paul Meehl, a professor at the University of Minnesota, published a book arguing that simple algorithms could consistently outperform experienced psychologists at predicting the future behavior of patients. His controversial claims inspired a series of corroborating studies that further established the power of analytics in complex decisionmaking.

Meehl didn't mince words about the real-world implications. "When one is dealing with human lives and life opportunities," he later wrote, "it is immoral to adopt a mode of decisionmaking which has been demonstrated repeatedly to be either inferior in success rate or, when equal, costlier to the client or the taxpayer."

This is an overstatement, at least when it comes to philanthropy. Giving is inherently good and should be encouraged in many forms. Additionally, effective philanthropy must balance quantitative analysis alongside qualitative insights, including input from the communities impacted. However, it is also time to modernize our tool kit in the fight against poverty.

When we donate, we are necessarily making a value judgment about every other organization that could have otherwise been funded. By informing the pivotal decisions behind our state's renowned generosity with all of the best tools and insights, we have the opportunity to turn our good intentions into great results.

And success in that arena would be infinitely more consequential than a Super Bowl.

Andrew Dayton is founder and CEO of the Constellation Fund.