Balancing the Mission Checkbook

This guest post was written by Judy Alnes, Executive Director of MAP for Nonprofits.

I was glad to be asked to fill Kate Barr’s blog shoes while she is on sabbatical. I often write pithy blogs, if only in my mind. This assignment forced me to round up some of those loose ideas and put pen to paper; or rather, fingers to keys.

It’s Time to Innovate

Social innovation is on the tip of a lot of tongues these days. Most of us in the nonprofit sector are facing the fact that financial resources will remain tight for several years. Many of us have tried to do “more with less.” We’re now awakening to the fact that it is time to do things differently. In other words, it is time to innovate.

So what is social innovation? I especially like the definition used by Andrew Wolk of Root Cause in a recent speech he gave to the Texas Governor’s Nonprofit Leadership Conference:

Social innovation is the process of developing, testing, honing, and spreading transformative approaches to pressing social issues. It is finding ways to do things better and utilize resources more wisely.

Just as important is what social innovation is not! It is not only the purview of those who are leaders of social enterprises. It’s not just for Ashoka Fellows; though they are a remarkably innovative group. In fact, innovation is a discipline that each and every nonprofit and institution needs to incorporate in its work.

Getting Started

Where do we start?

We start by nurturing the seeds of discontent most of us share that we’re not making the progress we want to make on the issues facing our communities and our world.

Next, we arm ourselves with information about innovative processes. I highly recommend two books: The Medici Effect and Blue Ocean Strategy. Then add a daily Google Alert on social innovation or on the innovations in your particular field. It is okay to copy other nonprofits’ innovations in your own organization. Take a look at www.ideaencore.com – an online marketplace of other nonprofit organization’s best practices and resources.

Inside our organizations we can form teams that work on “developing, testing, and honing” advancements in our fields. We can charge individuals with responsibility to work on the next improvements in our processes, products, and services. We can start to admire the breakthroughs being achieved in other fields and think through how those breakthroughs might translate to our own challenges.

Innovating won’t be easy. Many organizations have stretched their people thin in an effort to keep delivering services at a pre-recession level despite a decline in resources. It’s not hard to predict what will happen if we don’t get around to innovation. Our results will look a lot like they do today. As the great inventor Thomas Edison said, “there is a way to do it better – find it.”