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.
Sharing Our Growth: Pay attention to what matters most, not what others think matters most.
This is the twelfth 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 previous post in this series discussed the power of accountability as a differentiator for nonprofits. I emphasized that holding your organization accountable to specific outcomes can truly set you apart from others. In order to do this, though, leaders must learn to sift through all the noise standing in the way of a clear, determined focus on what matters: achieving these specific outcomes.
Because impact is hard to have and even harder to measure and communicate, nonprofits are typically insecure about the impact they are having. Consequently, organizations often are seduced into paying attention to what others think is important: press coverage, brand awareness, efficiency ratings of GuideStar and Charity Navigator, etc.
And some of these may in fact be important. But ascertain that for yourself rather than assuming it. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Sharing Our Growth: Accountability is a powerful differentiator in a crowded, competitive marketplace.
This is the eleventh in a series of posts that will tease out key ingredients from the exponential growth of Share Our Strength over the past few years.
The last few posts on the CWV Blog have explored the role of competition in building stronger organizations and fueling improved social outcomes. In her last post, Sara examined how understanding your organizations’ competitive advantage can help set you apart. At Share Our Strength, we have found that accountability can serve as a key component of competitive advantage.
Good intentions have long been the Achilles heel of the nonprofit universe because they are often the rationale for not being rigorous about measurement. But as the philanthropic marketplace gradually becomes more responsive and begins to reward high performance and superior strategy and execution and penalize low performance, stakeholders look for accountability.
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: Learn to Play Offense and Put Financial Instability Behind You.
This is the ninth in a series of posts that will tease out key ingredients from the exponential growth of Share Our Strength over the past few years.
Financial instability and/or peril is distracting, demoralizing and debilitating. If all of your energy is absorbed on the issue of how to make your payroll and your budget, you will not have enough left over to devote to strategy, growth, and mission. Every unanticipated expenditure will become a crisis.
There were periods at Share Our Strength where we had so little margin for error that we spent countless hours debating $3000 decisions that felt like they were make-or-break, and that may well have been. But the opportunity costs of spending our time that way were both high and corrosive. For many organizations this is so ingrained as the norm that it is almost accepted without question.
But there is another way. I think of it as the difference between playing offense and defense in football.
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...
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...
Sharing Our Growth: The most importance audience for your new strategy is sitting next to you.
This is the six 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 focused on the importance of placing talent above all else. Investing in human capital is neither cheap nor easy, but everything else flows from it. And once you’ve made the investment, you’ve gotta remember that your people are absolutely indispensable.
You will likely identify many potential external stakeholders whose support is essential to your success, but those who will be most important are those you sit next to.
Organizations invest great effort in trying to persuade external stakeholders like donors, press, corporate partners, etc. of the merits of their idea, usually more than they invest in persuading their most important constituency: each other!
Don’t expect that this can be accomplished by e-mail. Serious strategies to solve previously unsolved problems are almost by definition likely to be complex. As the physicist Richard Feynman said to reporters who asked him to explain his Nobel Prize for quantum electrodynamics in ways they average person could understand: “If I could explain it to the average person, it probably would not have won a Nobel Prize.”
After all of the hard work that goes into developing a strategy, it is often assumed that everyone understands and agrees with it, or more important, understands it the same way. But that is rarely the case. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Sharing Our Growth: Talent Trumps All Else
This is the fifth in a series of posts that will tease out key ingredients from the exponential growth of Share Our Strength over the past few years.
As I mentioned in my first post, we added 30 staff to a base of 65 in 2010 and we are hiring for 20 more now. This has been an expensive investment for us – one that has turned the heads of some of our key stakeholders. Spending money on people rather than programs can be a hard sell in the social sector.
But I believe that talent trumps all else.
Invest in talent first. Everything flows from it. Great ideas, great strategy, and great execution will not flow from a less than great team.
Such talent is expensive and must be searched for in places that nonprofits do not always search. There are infinite rationalizations for not paying higher salaries, not replacing loyal but low performing team members, not investing in seasoned managers when you need them. Those rationalizations will save you money but they will not enable you to achieve your mission.
The challenge is not only financial. It can be cultural as well. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Sharing Our Growth: Capacity Equals Impact
This is the fourth in a series of posts that will tease out key ingredients from the exponential growth of Share Our Strength over the past few years.
As I mentioned in my first post, getting Share Our Strength unstuck from our plateaued state required sharpening our strategy and making significant investments in capacity.
Because nonprofits are not typically engaged in manufacturing, or supply chain, or warehousing, capacity usually means staff and technology as opposed to equipment, facilities, etc.
It is difficult to increase impact without increasing capacity.
If you don’t assert the correlation between capacity and impact, then no one will assert it for you. In fact, you will fall victim to precisely the opposite bias and be measured against metrics stacked to ensure you don’t win: administrative overhead, salary, fundraising costs, etc.
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.