Where Nonprofits Fit in the Social Innovation Movement

I recently did an interview with Kellogg Venture Community‘s KVCcast host David Nosnik about where nonprofits fit in the social innovation movement. It’s a 20 minute conversation in which we discuss how nonprofits can:

• Recruit and manage a much more effective board of directors
• Raise growth capital
• Become more entrepreneurial to achieve more social impact
• Finance the social impact they seek to achieve
• And much more…

My argument in this interview, throughout the Social Velocity blog, and in everything we do here is that the social innovation movement has the potential to abandon the nonprofit sector.

Nonprofits have been working on social change since long before it was cool. But because they have been around for awhile, there is a danger that they could be left behind if they don’t understand, embrace and adapt to some of the new models that the social innovation movement brings forward. Losing the charity mindset, articulating and raising money for the true and complete costs of creating social impact, figuring out their theory of change, developing an overall financing strategy for their work are all things that nonprofits can do to accelerate their ability to create social change.

You can listen to the podcast interview here.

Tags: financing not fundraising, Fundraising, Kellogg Venture Community, nonprofit growth capital, nonprofit sector, Social Entrepreneurship, social innovation

Can Reactive Clark Kent Become Strategic Superman?

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…

This is an excerpt from my latest post at the Change.org blog. You can read the entire post here.

Tags: nonprofit charity mindset, nonprofit sector, nonprofit strategic plan, nonprofit strategy, social innovation