Nonprofits: It's Time to Innovate!
Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at 11:24AM
Can I be honest? I’m worried about the lack of nonprofit leadership creating a culture of innovation. While multi-channel outreach such as action alerts, microsites, social media, fundraising appeals, direct mail and telemarketing are good strategies to have in your toolbox to fundraise and market your organization; it’s simply not enough anymore. To truly raise your nonprofit’s profile (aka increase brand awareness), grow your constituency, and raise even more money in 2011 and beyond, organizations need to also focus on innovating.
A couple of weeks ago, J’aime Ohm won TechCrunch’s Distrupt Hackathon for developing a great app called 
WiseDame. The location based app is aimed at keeping women safe and was inspired by FourSquare and Gowalla which some critics feel is a bit too stalkerish. Instead WiseDame lets people you care about know where you are. For example, one of the main features of the app sends an alert to your selected friends and family to check in on you if and only if you don’t check in this location by X time.
“It’s like a Black Box that provides info on what you were last doing before an emergency occurred,” said Ohm.
While I whole-heartedly applaud Ohm for creating such a useful app, I can’t help but ask why didn’t a women’s group who focuses on domestic violence or sexual assault create this? Probably it’s because, like most nonprofits, they haven’t invested in high level technology staff such as a CTO (Chief Technology Officer) or CIO (Chief Information Officer) who can focus on matching technology and product development with the organizations programming, advocacy, fundraising, and marketing priorities.
According to the Nonprofit Leadership List, out of 1400 nonprofits, foundations, universities and museums surveyed, only 45 organizations have CTO’s. About 300 have CIO’s.
Here’s another example of a potential missed opportunity aimed at green consumers that an environmental nonprofit could have created as a fundraising model. ethicalDeal is a new startup in town. They have taken the LivingSocial model and adapted it to the environmentally friendly “green” movement. Their goal is to tap into the growing “green” market and lifestyle by making it easy and fun for people to try out the best green stuff their city has to offer. Their vision is to advance the green movement on a city-by-city basis across North America and they’re launching their first ethicalDeal in Vancouver this month! Great idea. Right? Could a nimble environmental nonprofit with a green consumer mission and who had invested in building a team with strong technical, business, and fundraising savvy staff launched a similar venture as a fundraising source and built this into a sustainable fundraising model? You bet, though admittedly this would have been a significant undertaking for a nonprofit. However, it could have paid off with the right nonprofit and seasoned team.
Over the years, there have been some great examples in the nonprofit community of nonprofits using social entrepreneurship models to raise money. DC Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that provides breakfast, outreach, and counseling services to homeless people living on the streets, also runs a popular full service catering company to raise money for the organization and provides culinary job training.
Nonprofits not only need to take a serious look at the social entrepreneurship model for fundraising and expanding their constituency, but they need to invest in using technology as a tool for innovation around their advocacy and programming issues. We can’t rely on Silicon Valley to constantly lead product and app development and do it for us. Nonprofits have some very talented in-house experts. Empower and build your teams to start taking charge and innovating.
What's your personal experience with nonprofis fostering a culture of innovation?
Reader Comments (13)
The model seems to be: watch one group do something well and then copy it and hope your supporters glam onto it. However, perhaps true innovation is adapting something new and useful for your audience.
1. Risk aversion. Nonprofit IT and communications managers are notorious technology followers, basing decisions on what others are doing rather than what is right for them.
2. Lack of investment in creative thinking. Innovation doesn't happen without investment in creating the environment. I'll let this HBR article say the rest: http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/08/six-secrets-to-creating-a-cult.html
3. Lack of availability of capital for investment. This is a fault of the funding structures more than the nonprofits themselves. There is previous few channels for a nonprofit's good idea to find the capital needed to bring it to market.
I recently took the reins of an innovation lab at Groundwire, a technology consulting nonprofit in Seattle, where the experiment is in being a provider of technological innovation for the environmental movement. We want to channel ideas from nonprofits, consultants, etc into viable software products that are made available to organizations.
Personally, I don't think it's realistic to ask mission-effective nonprofits to also be technology innovators.
But, it *is* realistic to ask whether technology innovators who want to make a difference can better partner with mission-effective nonprofits.
To me, instead of asking "Why didn’t a women’s group who focuses on domestic violence or sexual assault create this?" we should be asking "Why didn’t J’aime Ohm do this as a pro bono partnership with a nonprofit organization?"
Great pro bono matches don't come out of thin air, of course. On both sides there are smart and committed partners who see real value in aligning. But to get to that point, we need everyone who cares about the sector -- including consultants and foundations -- to reinforce the message that we all win with pro bono.
Earlier this year VolunteerMatch had the privilege to work with a brand engagement agency halfway across the country -- folks we had never met before -- on a pro bono tech project that resulted in our first ever iPhone app. An interview I conducted afterward with them may be useful for some readers:
http://blogs.volunteermatch.org/engagingvolunteers/2010/03/08/engaging-pro-bono-tech-interview-with-jonathan-feinstein-imc2/
Keep up the good work!
Robert Rosenthal
(Twitter: @volmatch)
But nonprofits have to choose carefully how they use their limited funds and resources. I want to thank Robert for posing the question differently. Also, I think it's important to understand that in the long list of direct services that are needed and expected from nonprofit agencies, that something like this app is a very, very expensive and timely project that may or may not turn out to be extremely helpful. Seeing that victims cannot control the behavior of an abusive person, it's ridiculous to think that a victim will always be able to know the days and times that they should be able to check-in by. This may be useful in some situations, but it won't prevent abusive behavior or necessarily keep someone safe. Nonprofits recognize this and have to balance the limitations of the product with the amount of money and time it'll cost to create. When I think of it that way, it makes more sense for the nonprofits to keep doing what they're really good at and leave some of the innovative technology creation up to those who have the skills, the money, and want to partner with them and do something good.
As a for-profit company I have access to capital (investment, loans) that I never would have as an non-profit and as a result I can have a bigger impact with my mission. I'm also in the process of registering my company as a BCorp (www.bcorporation.net), which will keep my shareholders committed to the triple bottom line.
I would encourage more social change leaders to think of launching a social venture and to profit with purpose!
Just my two cents and thanks for the mention about ethicalDeal!
~ Annalea Krebs
Twitter (@ethicalDeal)
Lack of resources: Nonprofits always struggle with this. Heck, even for profits struggle with this issue. But I'm convinced that nonprofits can innovate around their mission with the right leadership who empowers their staff to experiment some and think outside of the box for fundraising and advocacy. Marc Sirkin, Chief Community Officer for Autism Speaks gave a great presentation at the Blackbaud conference last week around some of the innovative work they are doing to raise more money. I will be writing about it this week on Frogloop.
Can we rely on volunteers: Volunteers are an integral part of many organizations. However, relying on volunteers to be the ones to innovate such as building our technology is one I wouldn't advocate for off the bat. Volunteers come and go, they often have a limited amount of time to devote and relying on them to build an app or your website can take you down a frustrating road and one with limited to no tech support. I have seen it work on occasion but for the most part I have seen it fail. However, I'm excited about the new http://www.Sparked.com micro-volunteering program that the founders of The Extraordinaries launched. I could see some folks volunteering to do small tech related work that wouldn't take much time or be too cumbersome for nonprofits to manage once the project was completed.
Friends and family can also safety plan with a victim to know that something is wrong if the victim doesn't call/text/email by a certain time as well. DV programs don't necessarily have to create something new and expensive when there is existing technology that can accomplish the same goal of safety in a similar way.
What a great conversation. I wish I had joined it earlier. Despite being a late joiner, I do detect a tone of habitual thinking in some of the responders answers to your question. As you know the first rule of innovation is to defer any judgement and secondly to stretch or brake our paradigm to generate ideas. I believe some of your responders need to stretch theirs.