10 Great Social Innovation Reads: October

I think it gets harder and harder every month to narrow down to a list of only 10 great reads in social innovation. October was no exception. Here are my top 10 of the last month (but actually more like 13 if you’re counting). As always, please add what I missed to the comments. And if you want to see the expanded list of what catches my eye, follow me on Twitter @nedgington.

You can also read the lists of Great Reads from previous months here.

1. Marketing is a brave new world these days, and so is fundraising. Replace “customer” with “donor” and “We’re All Marketers Now” from McKinsey Quarterly applies to nonprofits as well.




2. A new Chronicle of Philanthropy blog launched recently that focuses on innovation in the nonprofit world. One of the first posts is about how the U.S. Army’s practice of using a “devil’s advocate” in their decision-making processes is something that some philanthropists are copying in order to come up with better solutions.




3. Occupy Wall Street and the other protests in cities around the country was a big topic this month. Some of the most interesting were Who are the 99 percent?  from Ezra Klein in The Washington Post  and The Demographics of Occupy Wall Street from Fast Company.




4. From the Harvard Business Review blog comes an argument that I completely agree with. Nonprofits that are struggling lack a “strategy for connecting their mission with their ability to deliver.”




5. I know infographics are becoming overused, but this one is pretty cool: How the Top 50 Nonprofits Do Social Media.




6. And speaking of the top nonprofits, the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Philanthropy 400 is out, all about what the 400 wealthiest nonprofits are up to.




7. The Alliance for Children and Families, a membership group for human-service charities, released a new report identifying the emerging trends social service organizations must embrace in order to succeed.




8. If you missed the live-streaming from the White House last week on social impact bonds, Pay for Success: Investing in What Works, you can still watch archived recordings, or check out the Nonprofit Finance Fund’s great resources on the topic here.




9. As usual, Lucy Bernholz tells it like it is, in her argument that the current debate in American politics about shifting more of the burden of funding for core public services to private philanthropy is undemocratic.




10. Jennifer Landres from the Center for High Impact Philanthropy finds some lessons for philanthropy in the movie “Moneyball.”

Photo Credit: JeffersonDavis

Tags: Fundraising, nonprofit innovation, nonprofit social media, Occupy Wall Street, Philanthropy, social impact bonds, social service charities

This Week’s The Giving Show

I’m delighted to announce that I will be Michael Chatman’s guest on this week’s Giving Show. Michael was voted America’s Maverick Philanthropist and one of the nation’s leading authorities on new philanthropy. He heads the nation’s largest network of mission-related philanthropists giving up to $50,000 annually, The Association of Maverick Philanthropists.

Michael hosts a weekly radio show, called the Giving Show, the largest weekly audience devoted to the topic of philanthropy.

I’ll be Michael’s guest this week on Thursday, September 8th at 11:30am Eastern. You can click here to listen then.

We’ll be talking about Financing Not Fundraising, how to get your donors to be more effective, how philanthropy is changing, what the social entrepreneurship movement means for nonprofits and much more. I hope you’ll join us.

Click here to listen to the Giving Show on Thursday at 11:30am Eastern.

Tags: financing not fundraising, Michael Chatman, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit innovation, nonprofit trends, Philanthropy, Social Entrepreneurship, The Giving Show

Can Reactive Clark Kent Become Strategic Superman?

Note: This post originally appeared on the Change.org Social Entrepreneurship blog earlier this year.

For the nonprofit sector to truly climb aboard the social innovation train, as opposed to being abandoned by it, nonprofit leaders need to move past the reactive toward the strategic.

But is that possible? Have nonprofits been stuck in a resource-constrained, charity mindset for too long to be made strategic, bold, big thinkers? It’s been a vicious cycle. Nonprofits lack adequate resources so they become very protective of what they have and wary of any actions which might threaten those resources. Therefore they become exceedingly risk averse and fearful of innovation. They focus more often than not on keeping the doors open as opposed to investing time, energy and resources in long-term strategy.

But that’ s just not going to cut it anymore. These times demand a radically different mindset and approach. The nonprofit sector must move from the reactive to the strategic. So how does a reactive approach differ from a strategic one? It looks like this:

When a financial crisis hits the organization, the reactive approach is to focus on keeping the doors open and staying afloat. But a strategic approach focuses on what caused the crisis and how to fix the underlying problem, model or system so that they never return there again.

When a funder wants to award a significant sum to an organization for new programs that detract from, rather than bolster, the organization’s theory of change, a reactive approach focuses on the increase in revenue, but a strategic approach recognizes the misalignment and turns the money down.

A reactive approach allows program staff to continue with a status quo method of program delivery, but a strategic approach constantly asks hard questions, tracks results, pushes outcomes, restructures inefficient processes, gets underneath the surface to make programs better, stronger, more impactful, more sustainable.

A reactive leader arrives at board meetings with reports, charts and status updates, gets a rubber stamp on day-to-day activities and breathes a sigh of relief that the board didn’t ask too many questions. But a strategic leader analyzes the unique contributions each individual board member and the board as a whole can make and leverages those contributions effectively, engages the board in meaningful discussions and actions around where the organization is going and trends in the external marketplace, and focuses board work on big picture issues and opportunities, creating key external networks, and building a strong financial future.

A reactive approach helps the board recruit new members that fit narrow definitions of experience, gender, ethnicity, and size of pocketbook. A strategic approach compares the long-term goals of the organization to the competencies, networks, experience and resources required and creates an intentional board recruitment strategy to get there.

A reactive leader crosses things of their daily to do list and feels satisfied because the trains ran on time, crises were avoided, and everyone got a paycheck. A strategic leader is rarely satisfied and constantly works to build key alliances with external partners, learns new skills, pushes their staff harder, evaluates their work, continually refines their model and responds effectively to a constantly changing environment all in the name of greater impact.

A reactive leader allows the natural uncertainty of running a nonprofit to cause fear and inaction. A strategic leader, like a true entrepreneur, recognizes the opportunity for innovation that uncertainty offers and embraces and uses that opportunity to continually mold the organization’s solution to the external market of need and funding.

It remains to be seen whether a reactive leader can transform into a strategic one. I would bet that the success of the social innovation movement as a whole rides on it.

Photo Credit: Loren Javier

Tags: charity mindset, nonprofit innovation, nonprofit leadership, nonprofit strategy, reactive nonprofits, reinventing nonprofit sector, social innovation

A New Kind of Nonprofit Leader

In his New York Times column this week Bob Herbert strongly criticized America and its leaders for not stepping up to the plate to guide us through these very troubling times.  As he put it:

As a nation, we are becoming more and more accustomed to a sense of helplessness. We no longer rise to the great challenges before us. It’s not just that we can’t plug the oil leak, which is the perfect metaphor for what we’ve become. We can’t seem to do much of anything.

Although his column is perhaps a bit too bleak, he does make the point that we have forgotten how to lead ourselves out of a mess, and the messes are getting larger and larger.

The messes of the American system are often cleaned up by the nonprofit sector. Nonprofits are usually borne out of some disequilibrium that the market creates (poverty, homelessness, poor education, lack of healthcare).

However, lately the messes have been too much for even the nonprofit sector to bear. And at the same time a deep recession, government’s increasing off-loading of social services to the sector, donors growing desire for measurement, and a more wired world are all combining to demand dramatic changes to how nonprofits operate. As a result, nonprofit leaders need to adapt.

The day has come for a new kind of nonprofit leader, one who has the confidence, ability, foresight, energy, and strength of will to really lead. This new nonprofit leader:

• Embraces the idea of a networked nonprofit and is willing and able to break down the walls of control and risk aversion and let the world in as fully engaged partners in the work they are doing.
• Works toward completely integrating money into the impact they are trying to create, understanding that big plans for impact are not enough, you also must finance them.
• Realizes that it is no longer enough to just “do good work.” They must find a way to measure, in some form, the work that they are doing and be able to demonstrate results to the external market.
• Looks to the social entrepreneurship movement for inspiration and new ideas for accelerating social impact.
• Recognizes the importance of strong infrastructure and works to recruit and keep top talent and create effective technology and systems by fundraising for those real operating costs every year.
• Refuses to play nice with funders who want to undermine the mission and impact of the organization, competitors who are providing an inferior service, and board members who won’t contribute.
• Maintains an external view on how their organization can continue to add value in the outside marketplace of community problems.
• Constantly forces themselves, and their high-performing team of board, staff, funders and volunteers to ask hard questions, make bold goals, push themselves harder, and deliver more and more impact.

It’s a tall order, but true leadership always is. We no longer have the luxury of so-so leaders. These times demand confident, capable, engaging leaders who are a beacon to a society whose mounting problems are overwhelming at best.

Photo Credit: 3n

Tags: Bob Herbert, networked nonprofit, nonprofit innovation, nonprofit leadership