How Every Nonprofit Can Foster Innovation

How Every Nonprofit Can Foster Innovation

By: Mitch Stein

Believe it or not, nonprofits are made for innovation. Discover how your organization can harness the power of thinking differently.

Everything that people think they know about innovation is generally misguided. Our view can be shifted by flashy, shiny corporate talk that may warp our idea that innovation is exclusive. But that simply isn’t true.

Innovation isn’t expensive or exclusive. At its core, innovation is simply not accepting that the only way is the way it’s always been done. It’s being open to the possibility that maybe there's a better way for a process to work or a problem to be solved. And the change associated with “better” doesn’t have to be monumental. When you make that one change, it could ripple out to lots of other changes.

Sometimes people have a perception of the nonprofit sector as not being innovative. From resource constraints to staffing issues to unexpected environments, many organizations feel they don’t have the time or bandwidth to even think beyond the here and now. But the truth is, nonprofit folks are innovating daily. 

Innovation is finding a new approach to a problem, much like your mission, in how you interact with your community and deliver impact. Check out these simple actions to help your organization embrace its innovative spirit.

Shoot for the Incremental First (And Your Ice Bucket Challenge Will Come Later)

Organizations that have been around the block may feel hesitant to pursue innovation, but that’s where change management comes in handy. Your goal? Make innovation accessible to your team. It’s all in how you frame it. Ask your staff:

What would make our day, our lives, and our organization just 1% better? 

For example, someone may pursue automating a task that takes twenty minutes each day. Over time, this incrementalism will spark the conversations and promote psychological safety by embedding that question into your culture. 

Once you work through the processes and problems, you can move on to bigger questions that lead to movements like Movember and the Ice Bucket Challenge:

• How can we tell our story 1% better? 
• How can we make the recipient experience 1% better?
• How can we increase our donation form conversion rate by 1%? 

The difference is in how we converse about innovation or even tech projects in general. When it comes to radical ideas and the ability to grow them into innovative solutions, the conversations are just as important as the work it takes to get to that ideal end state. 

Get Inspired By the People Right Next to You

What needs to change in your organization? When you know what your colleagues are doing and where their sticking points are, process innovation becomes a collaborative exercise. Most often, two or more staff members or departments realize a crossover between their work and responsibilities or that someone's doing work that can lead to efficiency in other areas. When innovation takes on team spirit, you'll be amazed at what your team can discover and improve.

Foster Inclusion and Belonging Through Pitch Templates

Someone who has never presented an idea before may not have the same confidence as a team member with lots of experience pitching their ideas. Creating a pitch template that everyone is required to use changes the power dynamics, allowing ideas from many people to move forward. 

Creating a standardized format can also promote a culture of sharing. When presented in the same way, it's no longer Tom's idea or Chery's idea. It belongs to everyone, which makes change management and fear of failure much easier to overcome.

Find Ways to Bring Out the Extra in the Ordinary

Innovation doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel. When you think about your services and the challenges of the population you serve, what could you make 1% better? Small wins can make a big impact!

In considering the hospital experience for children, Starlight Children’s Foundation looked to changing into a hospital gown as a difficult transition for a child. For security, they created a double wraparound closure, and for comfort, they used pajama material and popular character prints from Star Wars and Frozen. 

And while the characters were certainly an upgrade, the team at Starlight Children’s Foundation saw another problem. The wait time before a procedure can be extremely stressful for the child. So, they asked, “What can we create to fill this time?” Their answer? Now the gowns have a QR code so children can use their phone or their guardians’ to scan it. The QR code takes them to a web page with the character on their gown that includes a special message relevant to their situation. 

An ordinary item, transformed with some simple touches inspired by the idea that the standard gown just wasn’t cutting it. What could your nonprofit innovate beyond the ordinary?

Contribute to a Culture of Learning

The ability to take risks is a privilege. While keeping up with nonprofit innovators feels like a given, pursuing new ideas at the risk of failure doesn’t always feel as doable for people of color or other underrepresented groups. The key to making risk-taking accessible is transparency regarding the pursuits that do fail. Yes, even those initiatives thought up by innovative leaders in the nonprofit space. 

Honesty and transparency about projects that fall short make risk-taking more accessible because it elevates the learning experience that comes with it. This invites people who may not feel comfortable stepping out to ask questions and point out areas needing improvement with confidence instead of fear. 

Measure the Impact of Your Nonprofit’s Innovations

Transparency means communicating outcomes through data you can share with your team, board, donor community, and corporate partners. Even if a project doesn’t run on course, showing impact data lets stakeholders know that you were responsible for tracking your progress and had the information you needed to know when to pivot or pause. And best of all, when your nonprofit team becomes well-versed in looking at an idea through the lens of data, they can make better decisions that support its success. 

Reach Peak Innovation Through Your DEIB Commitment

Diverse teams are more innovative. Having a diversity of viewpoints and collectively creating a vision for what's coming next is essential to the growth of your organization. It’s more than giving someone a seat at the table, it’s cultivating a sense of belonging and ensuring that everyone’s voice is heard, valued, and incorporated into your vision. For ideas on how to bolster DEIB within your organization, look to these best practices.

Celebrate the Wins and the Fails

Truly innovative culture comes from the top down. You can have the most thoughtful, innovative people promoting change within your organization, but unless it's supported at a leadership level, it's just not going to happen. Your leadership doesn’t have to be innovative to drive innovation. In fact, their contribution is as simple as celebrating the team’s attempts to innovate - regardless of whether they succeed. 

The initiatives that don’t work out? Celebrate the learning experience. The ones that do, celebrate the win. Championing the act of saying “no” to stale processes or been-there-done-that projects in pursuit of something new creates a safe space for team members to go beyond the possible and seek better for your organization, as well as the people you serve. And that’s a good thing. It’s your mission, after all.

If this topic is of interest, check out the panel discussion we hosted, Shoot for the Stars: Embracing Nonprofit Innovation - and all the other great discussions at joinpond.com. If you’re seeking a new vendor - software, services, consulting, etc. - to power your organization’s innovation, list your request on Pond, and we’ll help match you with great vendors you can vet right in the platform.  

About the Author:

I am absolutely obsessed with bringing high impact innovation to the nonprofit sector. I'm a LinkedIn super user and love sharing the lessons I'm learning in real time from incredible nonprofit leaders on Pond or my personal experience getting a start up off the ground. After graduating from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, I spent 7 years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs before taking the start up leap - jumping into Pond. It’s now clear to me that the business world actually has way more to learn from nonprofits than the other way around.