A Monster List of Social Innovation Books, Blogs, Conferences, Funders

Since today is Halloween, I thought I’d offer a monster list of resources for nonprofit leaders, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, board members and others involved in creating social change.

The following list comes from the Resources page of the Social Velocity web site. The page includes social innovation conferences, organizations, funders, blogs, books and other things that anyone involved in the social change space should be aware of. It could be a starting point or an ongoing exploration of what’s going on in the space.

We are constantly adding to the Resources page, so if we are missing something, let us know in the comments.

Organizations Moving Social Innovation Forward

Funders

• 130 Ways to Fund Your Social Venture
• Center for Effective Philanthropy
• Dell Social Innovation Competition
• Echoing Green
• New Profit
• Nonprofit Finance Fund
• Public-Philanthropic Partnerships at the Council on Foundations
• Robert Wood Johnson’s Pioneer Portfolio
• Sea Change Capital
• Unreasonable Institute
• Venture Philanthropy Partners

Conferences

• Accelerating Social Entrepreneurship in the Age of Austerity
• Bottom Billions Bottom Line
• Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting
• Conference on Scaling Impact (by Social Impact Exchange)
• FSG and SSIR Collective Impact Conference
• Grantmakers for Effective Organizations Conference
• Harvard Social Enterprise Conference
• Net Change Week
• Net Impact 2011 Conference
• NextGen: Charity
• The Nonprofit Management Institute (by Stanford Social Innovation Review)
• Opportunity Collaboration
• ReVisioning Value
• Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship
• Social Capital Markets Conference
• Social Enterprise Summit
• Social Enterprise World Forum
• Social Good Summit
• Social Venture Capital / Social Enterprise (Miami)
• Social Venture Network Conference
• Social Venture Partners International Annual Conference
• Sustainatopia
• The Feast
• UST Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship

Philanthropic Thought Leaders

• Blue Print Research and Design
• The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation
• Tactical Philanthropy Advisors

Things to Read

Blogs

• A Smart Bear: Startups & Marketing for Geeks
• About.com Nonprofit Charitable Orgs
• Against the Grain
• Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits are Using Social Media to Power Change
• Dan Pallotta: Harvard Business Review
• Deep Social Impact
• Dowser
• Full Contact Philanthropy
• GuideStar: Bob Ottenhoff Blog
• Money and Mission
• New Philanthropy Capital's Blog
• NFF's Social Currency Blog
• Philanthropy 2173
• PhilanTopic
• SocialEarth
• SSIR Opinion Blog: Nonprofit Management
• SSIR Opinion Blog: Social Entrepreneurship
• Tactical Philanthropy
• UnSectored

Financing Impact

• Beyond Fundraising
• Nonprofit Growth Capital, Building is not Buying
• The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle
• Social Finance
• Social Impact Bonds
• The Task Force on Social Finance
• Understanding Nonprofit Financial Statements

Using Social Media

• The Dragonfly Effect
• The Networked Nonprofit

Being Strategic

• Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
• Creating Public Value
• Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits
• Good to Great
• Good to Great and the Social Sector
• Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity
• Strategic Management of Charter Schools

Finding Inspiration

• Getting to Maybe: How the World is Changed
• How to Change the World
• One Day, All Children…: The Unlikely Triumph Of Teach For America And What I Learned Along The Way
• Social Innovation Generation
• The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World
• The Social Innovation Dynamic
• Work on Purpose

Growing Solutions

• Franchise Organizations
• Scaling Social Impact: Strategies for Spreading Social Innovations. Stanford Social Innovation Review
• The Five Meanings of Scale
• The Nonprofit Outcomes Toolbox

Leading Well

• Leadership Without Easy Answers
• Real Change Leaders

Photo Credit: annabellaphoto

Tags: funding for social entrepreneurship, nonprofit, nonprofit financing, nonprofit funders, nonprofit leadership, nonprofit strategy, Philanthropy, social change funders, Social Entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship conferences, social innovation, social innovation blogs

Moving From Scarcity to Abundance: An Interview with Beth Kanter

In this month’s Social Velocity blog interview, we’re talking with Beth Kanter.  Beth is a leading thinker and innovator around social media for nonprofits. She writes one of the longest running and most popular (and one of my favorite) blogs for nonprofits  Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media. She also co-authored the seminal book The Networked Nonprofit with Allison Fine in 2010, which gives nonprofits a road map for understanding the brave new world of social media and how to embrace it. I often recommend the book to my clients because it provides a completely new way of understanding how nonprofits can and should fit into the wider marketplace. Beth has over 30 years working in the nonprofit sector in technology, training, capacity building, evaluation, fundraising, and marketing.

You can read past interviews in our Social Innovation Interview Series here.

Nell: Because the nonprofit sector is undercapitalized it is highly competitive and individual nonprofits tend to isolate themselves and become “fortresses” as you call them. Yet what you are arguing for, a networked  or connected mentality, is a huge change for a risk-averse sector. How realistic is it to think that the majority of nonprofits will embrace this change? What will convince the majority of nonprofits to change?

Beth: That’s a great question.  I’m suggesting that nonprofit shift from a scarcity mentality to embrace abundance.  It is a much less exhausting way of working, plus it is more sustainable. Here’s more, here and here.

Nell: For those nonprofits that haven’t yet recognized social media as a tool for achieving their mission, what do you think is holding them back? What are the hurdles that keep them from a networked approach?

Beth: Risk adversity – issues around organizational culture or changing the way they work or deliver programs.  Here’s a recent example from the classical music world. Nonprofits need to establish a social media policy, there’s more here.

Nell: One idea that you propose is that nonprofit boards use social media to get those outside the organization to contribute to the direction and strategy of the organization (online board meetings, etc). This is a radical idea in a sector that has historically kept their board exclusive and elusive. What is the value of a more disbursed form of leadership, and can it work for every nonprofit?

Beth: It can work, but the nonprofit culture and way of working has to be open enough to accept it and do it.  The value — better quality programs, ideas, potential revenue, and more.   More here and here.

Nell: What does a networked executive director look like? Or does the whole understanding of the nonprofit executive director need to change as well?

Beth: Wow, that is such a good question!  The big thing that needs to change is that ED’s need to work with a networked mindset, a stance toward leadership that prioritizes openness, transparency, relationship building and distributed decision-making, more here.

Nell: What do you think will happen to those nonprofits that don’t move toward a networked approach?

Beth: There will be degrees of networked approaches, but this approach helps nonprofits remain relevant so they don’t need to over think.

Nell: For those nonprofits who have embraced the ideas of the networked nonprofit, what’s the next frontier? What do they need to be doing, thinking about, or experimenting with next?

Beth: Master the networked approach and the next thing on the horizon is the anytime, anywhere nonprofit – the impact of mobility – not just the use of smartphones, but the idea that we’re no longer tethered to a screen.

Tags: Beth Kanter, Beth's Blog, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit change, nonprofit leadership, nonprofit social media policy, nonprofits and social media, The Networked Nonprofit

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

What I’m Reading

Someone asked me the other day how long it takes me to write a blog post. I told them the writing only takes about an hour or two. However, the reading and thinking about what’s being done, or said, or written about and what I want to add to the conversation takes many times longer. So, to that end, I thought I’d give you a list of the blog posts, articles, and books that caught my interest and really made me think in the past month…

• Punching at Your Own Weight in Social Media
• Philanthropy’s Next Decade
• Leadership to the Rescue
• The Social Innovation Fund One Year Later
• The Giving Pledge and the Opportunity of a Generation
• U.S. Lagging, Not Leading, Social Entrepreneurship
• Warren Buffett’s Philanthropic Pledge
• How Can Nonprofits Plan for Growth and Impact?
• The Networked Nonprofit
• Social Media Listening: You Don’t Have To Be Joey Chestnut on the 4th of July!
• Wall Street Saves the World!
• Getting Results: Outputs, Outcomes & Impact
• The Slacktivist Debate Continues
• Is All Entrepreneurship Social?
• Are You Crazy Enough to Change the World?

What caught your interest this month?  Add to the list in the comments.

Photo Credit: pixel0908

Tags: nonprofit growth, nonprofit leadership, nonprofit outcomes, Philanthropy, Social Innovation Fund, social media, The Networked Nonprofit, Warren Buffett

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