Sharing What We’ve Built with Nonprofits

At New Story, we build homes for families living in extreme poverty. Our purpose is to create an operating system and collective of partners in order to create a world where no human being lives in survival mode.

So why build an operating system? An operating system can mean many things to many people, but to us it means increasing our net impact past our own organizational reach and thus having a far greater impact than if we acted alone.

Step 1 :: Having Empathy

How do we create an Operating System for nonprofits? This the question we’re working through as a team. An operating system is almost always complex and multi-pronged, so where do we start? What assumptions do we have baked into our heads that need to be tested? Our first step is identifying the top pain points other housing organizations have. What are their top 3 pain points?

Why? Empathy.

An alternative approach would be to pitching housing organizations on the mobile tech tool we’ve built or a playbook around home design. A pitch-first or solution-first approach would be ignoring what their true needs may be. Thus inhibiting us to understand their true pains/problems first and then focus on a possible solution. Problem first, solution second.

Step 2,3,4,5…

Our process past step one (problem research) is unclear, however we believe by focusing on problems first we will be able to unlock and growth housing organizations’ capacity and impact for locals.

If you know of a housing organization (NGO, gov’t, etc) looking to improve their work and open to chatting, please email me at matthew@newstorycharity.org.