11 Key Ingredients for Exponential Growth & Transformational Social Change
Share Our Strength has been on an incredible journey of growth over the past few years. From 2008 to 2011, we’ve gone from being a $13-million organization to a $34-million organization. In the past year or so, we’ve more than doubled our staff size from 65 to 140.
But we have not grown for the joy of feeling bigger and more powerful. We have grown because we were determined to confront a social problem on the scale that it exists. We pledged to end childhood hunger in America by 2015. And we could not keep our pledge without growing.
This is the last in a series of posts that have attempted to tease out key ingredients from this exponential growth. Each of these posts has examined one of 11 key ingredients, each of which builds on the others and none of which would have brought successful growth in isolation.
Why Competitive Advantage Matters. Even for Nonprofits.
As Summer hinted in her post last week, some people in the social sector simply don’t like to talk about competition. But in reality, all nonprofits compete with each other for needed resources: donors, sponsors, clients and consumers, staff, volunteers, nearly anything and everything needed for success.
Organizations that actually dedicate time and energy to truly understanding and internalizing their position in the collaborative / competitive landscape are best able to achieve sustainability and to help those in need. Competitive analysis helps you to:
- Identify where your program fits into the broader environment
- Identify the forces that cause consumers not to choose your product/services or attend your programs
- Understand the gap/s in needs of consumers or clients, and work to fill those gaps
- Define your niche
Ultimately, such analysis allows you to identify your competitive advantage. Competitive advantage is something that is derived from your organization’s strengths, making you different from the competition and more effective at achieving impact. Competitive advantage allows you to set the work of your organization apart.
Leap & Compete. Don’t Expect A Net.
“Leap, and the net will appear.” – John Burroughs
Decision making in nonprofits often reminds me of the above quote. Sometimes such decision making leads to incredible innovation, valuable risk taking and/or productive experimentation. But all too often, such behavior takes a much different form: well-intentioned community members haphazardly forming a nonprofit to meet a need they see in the community and opening their new organization’s doors with little (or no) planning or research on their “target market.”
Truth be told, most nonprofits don’t even think about terms like “target market” – or consumer demand or promotional tactics or market trends. Sure, these concepts can sometimes be nothing more than jargon. But they can also drive organizational performance and, ultimately, greater social outcomes. One of the most powerful of these concepts is “competition,” which Billy highlighted in his last blog post.
The capitalist view of competition is that it drives out inefficient producers: Those companies that can produce more at a lower cost are going to be more attractive to consumers (who will feel the benefit in their wallets). This generates incentives for creating products that offer more and more value to consumers while costing producers less and less to produce.
Can you imagine a world in which nonprofits were producing social outcomes of greater and greater value while spending less and less to produce them?
Yet, “competition” is still a naughty word in the social sector. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Sharing Our Growth: Be Collaborative but also Competitive.
This is the tenth in a series of posts that will tease out key ingredients from the exponential growth of Share Our Strength over the past few years. My last post examined why nonprofits must learn to play offense. This post continues that theme by exploring the importance of embracing competitiveness.
Nonprofits need to be more intentional and purposeful about competing – understanding that to compete at any level you must compete at every level.
We are not just competing with other organizations to deliver the best outcomes. We are competing with them to attract and retain the best people, to ensure that we work not with whatever left over resources may be available, but with the best resources available. This may mean foregoing pro bono services and instead contracting with marketing firms, law firms, etc. It will definitely mean paying competitive compensation so that you can recruit not only the best talent in the nonprofit sector, but the best talent wherever it is found.
Nonprofits need not compete to take market share or to put others out of business, but rather to be the best version of themselves that they can possibly be.
Sharing Our Growth: Social entrepreneurship without public policy is like a garage band without amps.
This is the eighth in a series of posts that will tease out key ingredients from the exponential growth of Share Our Strength over the past few years.
In my last three posts, I’ve examined the power of people in creating social change. First, I discussed the primacy of finding and building the right team of talent. Second, I underscored why developing processes and practices to keep this talent aligned and on board cannot be overlooked. And in my last post, I discussed the critical truth that changing the world takes a lot more than a small, talented team; indeed, it requires a relentless commitment to building a network of shareholders who share your core objectives.
But people are not enough. If your mission is ambitious and impactful the odds are it cannot be achieved without a public policy component.
There are many things nonprofits can do that government cannot. They can innovate and take risks and be closer to the people they serve. But once they’ve built a better mousetrap, it requires public support to get it to scale. Otherwise you are pushing a boulder up a hill and it will slide down again. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
5 Strategies for Effective Stakeholder Management
In his recent post, Bill Shore urges nonprofits to pay more attention to their stakeholders, because no nonprofit organization is capable of achieving the change it seeks all on its own.
While most nonprofits understand the importance of keeping stakeholders engaged, we’ve seen many nonprofit leaders become overwhelmed with the “when, which, how often, and how” of stakeholder engagement. Our clients often ask us for help in figuring out how best to manage stakeholder engagement.
In our work with nonprofits, we have identified 5 key strategies for effective stakeholder management:
- Develop a comprehensive list of people and/or organizations that have the ability to impact your organization or issue. Positively or negatively. Both are important.
- Segment your stakeholders based on your understanding of the degree of their ability to impact your desired outcomes (high, medium, or low).
- Assign “owners” from your organization to manage each high value stakeholder based on their level of potential impact. Who should manage “high impact” stakeholders? They should likely be assigned to the ED and Board members. What about “low impact” stakeholders? They could be great candidates for your e-newsletter. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Sharing Our Growth: Margaret Mead was Wrong
This is the seventh in a series of posts that will tease out key ingredients from the exponential growth of Share Our Strength over the past few years.
In my last post, I emphasized the importance of acknowledging that your most important stakeholders are those people sitting next to you: your staff. If you do not consciously convince each other of the credibility and criticality of your strategy, it’s going to be hard to convince others.
At the same time, I do not want to lose sight of the power and necessity of building a network of external evangelists for your strategy.
Randomly visit the headquarters of any ten nonprofits and you’ll find that at least nine have a poster somewhere on their wall with the iconic and reassuring words of Margaret Mead to
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”
The words are reassuring and inspiring but would be more accurate if amended to read “can begin to change the world.”
Actually changing the world takes a lot more than a small group. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
5 Critical Themes for the Future of Philanthropy
I recently returned from the Council on Foundations 2011 Annual Conference. It was a thought-provoking gathering that raised many more questions about the field of philanthropy than it answered. That said, time and time again, it reaffirmed for me the need for the work of organizations like Community Wealth Ventures and our colleagues in the field.
A few critical themes raised by Foundation leaders that remain on my mind:
1. Fund fundraising and capacity building efforts. Dan Pallotta opened the conference, arguing that “when you fund programs, you buy something. When you fund fundraising, you build something.” He professed that only when foundations embrace this understanding will we achieve the social impact desired.
2. Systemic change is an imperative. We must encourage use of transformative grantmaking approaches that realize greater leverage. For too long, foundations have had the luxury of not investing activities that change systems. Several Foundation leaders called for more Foundations to fund social justice activities that solve issues of inequality and poverty. Furthermore, Foundations like Kellogg, Tides and Casey argued that the philanthropic community must transform itself, and get comfortable with funding different types of ventures that scale social solutions. Program Related Investments and Mission Related Investments were highlighted as high-potential tools.
3. Systemic change is closely linked to diversity. Diversity is something we value. But we still have not come far enough. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
What Can Listening Tell Us About Successful Cross-Sectoral Partnerships?
Across the country, families seeking affordable housing, women seeking shelter from domestic violence and recent immigrants seeking legal support have all encountered the same stark reality: the demand for health and human service programs significantly outweighs the supply.
Public funding for such programs has dropped in communities throughout America. There simply isn’t enough public support to meet the growing demand for these services.
Yet in the face of such grim realities, we continue to see passionate people and organizations developing innovative solutions to these funding constraints.
Recently, George Mason University (GMU) and Community Wealth Ventures engaged in a “Listening Project” with the Fairfax County Virginia Human Services departments, intended to bring together nonprofits, corporations and County staff. We sought to uncover how Fairfax County might best continue to meet human service needs through increased nonprofit capacity in a time of decreasing government funding support. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Scaling Social Impact: Who, What, When, Where, Why & How?
What is scaling? Why does it matter? What’s the secret to pulling it off? Earlier this week, the Social Impact Exchange’s Knowledge Working Group dove headfirst into these and other related questions. This inaugural meeting brought together thinkers and doers in the nonprofit sector to share and collaborate around scaling impact.
For those who aren’t familiar, the Social Impact Exchange is a project of an organization called Growth Philanthropy Network. The Exchange is dedicated to creating a forum to share knowledge and increase investment in scaling social impact.
A few key themes and observations: Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Community Wealth Ventures (CWV) is a management consulting firm that emboldens and equips leadership teams to innovate, grow and sustain organizations that build a better world.
CWV offers strategy and implementation services to nonprofit organizations and philanthropic foundations, partnering with them to design and implement innovative approaches to growth and sustainability. CWV supports nonprofit sustainability through a variety of strategies, with core expertise in
social franchising and social enterprise. CWV’s collaborative approach to consulting focuses on equipping leadership teams with the skills they need to execute the strategy.
CWV is a wholly-owned, for-profit subsidiary of Share Our Strength, one of the Nation's leading anti-hunger and anti-poverty organizations.