Empowering non-profits to achieve breakthrough results
Is your social impact organization designed and funded for sustained innovation?
The human impact of the current crises has made the work of social impact organizations even more urgent. While most nonprofits understand this imperative, few are set up to create new solutions in midst of crisis or tackle enduring societal challenges.
Social impact organizations must position themselves to meet the moment. Disruptive forces can create new avenues for organizations -- if they can turn uncertainty into opportunity.
Agile Innovation design
Innovation is not just catching lightning in a bottle. It requires the intentional design of the context and way an organization functions. Innovative organizations share key design characteristics and capacities. Key features include catalytic leadership, diverse interdisciplinary teams, collaboration, a culture of learning, iterative design processes such as design thinking or lean/agile, and innovation funding.
Innovation also requires dynamic funding resources. Traditional philanthropic funding is often too slow, incremental, and constrained. Many funders are interested in funding programs or products that have already been developed and can demonstrate promise. Often funders are “racing to be second” with the early funders bearing the risks.
Agility enables organizations to dynamically generate opportunities by reading, understanding, and leveraging a rapidly changing environment. Agile addresses the limitations of traditional fundraising and is far more dynamic.
Nonprofits create an innovation funding engine by integrating entrepreneurial and social venture funders into the design work from the start. Funders are therefore investing in their innovation capabilities as well as their emerging work.
Benefits
✔️With their finger on the pulse, they can quickly capitalize on changes in the landscape.
✔️Capacity for fundraising will increase when they create interdisciplinary teams across the organization.
✔️Funders will become partners working directly on program innovations.
✔️Collaboration with other organizations will create bigger opportunities for impact.
✔️The organization will raise significantly more funds.
✔️With each cycle of effort, the organization will learn and adjust their strategies
HOW TO GET STARTED
There is no better time to start than during this time of upheaval. You do not need to start from scratch. Your current efforts can be leveraged as you begin to implement a more dynamic approach.
We work to understand your organization’s most pressing needs and challenges through a discovery process. From this work, we customize services and approaches to meet your specific needs while leveraging your assets and organizational talents.