Nonprofit success stories: 3 models for solving pandemic challenges
Social enterprises that nimbly pivot to new ways of carrying out their mission can not just survive, but outright thrive
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, nonprofits quickly shifted into crisis mode, many preparing for a steep but temporary decline. Recent studies suggest that up to a third of nonprofits will close their doors due to the pandemic. However, as it became clear that COVID-19 was creating long-lasting challenges, an entirely new and unanticipated set of problems emerged. Nonprofit organizations that can adjust to these problems and continue to carry out their missions successfully are more likely to survive, and even thrive, because they have found new ways to solve critical problems.
As director of strategic partnerships at the nonprofit accelerator Multiplier, I’ve witnessed some of the best and brightest social enterprise leaders working out these problems. Our project teams regularly find themselves in the thick of designing and executing shifts in strategy, pivots in tactics and new paths in response to a pandemic-disrupted world. The short case studies below illustrate three exemplary approaches and some essential takeaways that might help other nonprofit leaders respond to crisis and build organizational resilience.
Purpose-built direct relief: Catch Together
The challenge: Catch Together helps small fishing businesses and fishing communities improve the profitability, quality and sustainability of their fisheries. It had developed novel mechanisms that enabled these sustainable fishing businesses to compete with corporate behemoths, but when the pandemic hit, even the major players struggled to sell their catch in a collapsing seafood market. Catch Together needed to refocus on its stakeholders’ survival.
The solution: Catch Together built its initial success on giving fishing communities the tools to rebalance a system that was stacked against them. As the pandemic-driven economic crisis mounted, Catch Together saw how massive unemployment, and not just in the fishing industry, was driving skyrocketing demand at food banks. Applying their systemic perspective, the Catch Together team thought that they could help solve two problems at once.
They essentially created a temporary seafood market by obtaining a major grant to purchase seafood from small-scale fishermen and then donate it to local food banks that primarily served people of color and indigenous populations. This allowed Catch Together’s stakeholders to earn a living wage while providing food banks with a needed influx of healthy protein. Catch Together will deploy more than $5 million to purchase sustainably caught seafood and deliver more than 1.5 million meals to hungry families.
Keys to success: Catch Together’s deep relationships in the communities it works with enabled the team to see problems unfolding in real time — and not just within the primary stakeholder group. They not only had the vision to connect two issues (the collapsing seafood market and growing food insecurity), but also had the community and systemic connections needed to implement their solution. Organizations that do the hard work required to build this degree of trust and ground-level knowledge will be poised to respond effectively to crises and seize opportunities when they present themselves.
Total shift from offline to online: Rogue Water Lab
The challenge: Rogue Water Lab aims to revolutionize the way the water industry communicates by equipping the next generation of water communicators with the skills needed to foster innovation and leadership. One of its key initiatives is a symposium called Catalyst that brings new and established water leaders from around the country together to learn and collaborate in the same place at the same time. It’s a high-energy event designed to generate a level of enthusiasm and energy that will spur water industry leaders to action when they return home. Like many nonprofits, Rogue wondered: Could it create the same excitement in a virtual environment? Would people even attend?
The solution: The Rogue team quickly found some excellent virtual conference tools that would allow breakout sessions and small “tables” for conversation and networking. The hard part was the planning, the dry runs of sessions and the prepping of speakers, all of which took longer than expected. A virtual conference allows no room for winging it and offers limited opportunity for adjusting in real time. Although the platform provided the tools the team needed, it would be unforgiving if they did not execute flawlessly.
Rogue had always kept the cost of Catalyst low to ensure accessibility, and it realized it could drop that price even lower — and attract water leaders from around the country — without all the costs of an in-person event. And the price was now so low that most attendees could sign up and not feel the loss if they decided not to attend. To ensure strong attendance, though, Rogue set the expectation that attendees could pop in and out of sessions, and structured them accordingly. It also kept an element of traditional conferences: the swag bag. Each attendee received a swag bag in the mail that connected — in a fun way — to conference goals and nudged them to attend.
The result was a twofold increase in attendance over previous conferences. Some called it the coolest virtual meeting they had attended, and said Virtual Catalyst felt like a “real” conference, complete with the ability to interact with people sitting next to them at tables. And while it couldn’t replicate the in-person experience, the low-barrier online event attracted many newcomers to Catalyst and Rogue.
Keys to success: In the current work-from-home environment, people are craving new ways to learn and collaborate. Many virtual events have not yet figured out how to integrate collaboration and networking and can end up feeling stale and boring. But Rogue challenged itself to overcome some of the deficits of virtual events and worked hard to integrate a fun experience, Rogue’s unique personality, and compelling speakers and content into all aspects of the conference. Though this was a high-risk, high-reward scenario, Rogue rose to the challenge and proved that a unique experience, coupled with compelling content and a great price point, can hook many more attendees than you might envision — and keep them coming back for more.
The COVID-inspired startup: Covid Act Now
The challenge: Covid Act Now is a pandemic information platform that draws on a multidisciplinary team of technologists, epidemiologists, health experts and public policy leaders to provide the best-available local-level disease intelligence and data analysis on COVID-19 in the United States.
Led by data scientists and technologists at some of Silicon Valley’s best-known companies, the enterprise started as a group of volunteers who saw early in the pandemic that established institutions were poorly positioned to provide the real-time information decision-makers needed to respond effectively. Covid Act Now published the first version of its model on March 20. Federal, state and local government officials, as well as journalists and fact-hungry citizens, immediately saw its utility.
And the founders realized that creating a reliable, trustworthy platform for COVID-19 data and analysis was going to require a real organization.
The solution: The team was rapidly iterating on the platform, but they realized they needed help to create an organization that could receive grant funding. So while the epidemiologists, data analysts and engineers were fine-tuning the COVID-19 model, the organization contracted with Multiplier to rapidly move to 501(c)(3) status. Multiplier was able to quickly approve it as a project with tax-exempt status on a temporary basis, something that is extraordinarily rare for us, and the IRS approved Covid Act Now for tax-exempt status via the fast-track process one month later.
Now the platform supplies intelligence to help political and health care leaders, as well as the public at large, understand where the pandemic is currently and forecast where it’s headed; make better, faster decisions that save more lives; and empower citizens with open, accessible information.
Keys to success: The Covid Act Now team started with a strong vision for what they wanted to accomplish and methodically identified the support they needed to get to work. They went full throttle into implementation but didn’t skip any necessary steps. They knew a great idea was not enough to achieve their vision and clearly defined the path to success early on.
These case studies, and many more, demonstrate that innovators can thrive in the nonprofit sector and the challenges we face can drive us forward. Nonprofits that can quickly identify the scope of new problems and nimbly pivot to solutions that may be unfamiliar will continue to advance their missions. They will also have a leg up in attracting the support they need, as well as the resilience to survive this crisis and future ones.
