A Practical Approach to Nonprofit Innovation
During a conversation with members of a local nonprofit we started pondering how to drive innovation in their organization.
While my direct experience has been with for profit organization, hearing about their challenges led me to think how I would leverage my corporate entrepreneurship experience to tackle similar challenges in the nonprofit realm.
Taking a Page from Corporate Entrepreneurship
In order to build up momentum, it is always best to create an innovation culture by starting with high impact, low risk innovation initiatives. In my experience as a Corporate Entrepreneur, I find that innovation initiatives directly tied up to revenue generation tend to fit the bill.
Looking at revenue generation as the corporate outcome that allows us to invest in better ways to serve our customer lead us to realize that donations to nonprofits serve a similar purpose: to better serve their audience.
So looking for reasons why donors might be turning you down, and alternative models to increase fund raising ability could be a good way to get started with nonprofit innovation.
Your Innovation Tool Set
While there are a few ways to get started, here are some options in case you are a first timer:
- Design Thinking: is a design driven approach where both problem identification and solution creation are iterated in order to best address the constituency needs.
- Validated Learning: Based on concepts of The Lean Startup, this iterative approach suggests that you Build a model, Measure its results, and Learn from the experience by incorporating improvements into the next iteration.
In order to speed up results and reduce upfront investment, I have traditionally favored an opportunity driven iterative approach, where a custom solution is devised in order to close a particular customer (donor) opportunity, and then generalized over time as similar donor opportunities are tackled in each iteration. This approach might be particularly compelling to nonprofits working with fewer donors making large contributions. Nonprofits with a large number of donors making small contributions might be better off using one of the options above or even adopting crowdfunding to drive organizational innovation.
Driving Innovation Further
Another way to drive innovation even further into your organization’s day to day activities is to highlight any planned innovation initiatives which will then be funded by their regular or incremental donations in the pitch to donors.
If incremental donations are particularly earmarked to drive specific innovation initiatives, it is worth looking into ways to keep the donors appraised of the progress of the initiative, at which point you may want to bring Agile concepts into your nonprofit. And below is a good overview of Scrum (the most used Agile framework today) in case you have never been exposed to it.
Additional Resources
Did we get your engines running? So here are a few noteworthy articles on Nonprofit Innovation:
- Is Your Nonprofit Built for Sustained Innovation? — Stanford Social Innovation Review.
- The Future of Nonprofits: Run Them Like an Innovative Business — Inc.
Is you nonprofit running an innovation program? What works and does not work? Would you like to experiment the strategies shared in this article? Feel free to use the comment box below to share your experience and point of view. And please follow me if you would like to be automatically notified when I publish new articles.
This work by Marcelo Bernardes (@marcelobern) was originally originally published at www.linkedin.com.
