Forces For Good
June 23, 2008 by markhsmith · Leave a Comment
Forces For Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits
One of the emerging trends in philanthropy is the concept of “giving while living”–with donors taking an active role in their philanthropy during their lifetimes. Actually, this concept is not new, it was pioneered by Andrew Carnegie and outlined in his article “Wealth”, published in 1889. Carnegie encouraged “the rich man to attend to the administration of wealth during his life.” Carnegie also said, “Of every thousand dollars spent in so called charity to-day, it is probable that $950 is unwisely spent; so spent, indeed as to produce the very evils which it proposes to mitigate or cure.” Carnegie proposed that the skills & talents that were used to create the wealth in the first place, were the same skills & talents required to give away the wealth during a person’s lifetime. The Wealth article has influenced both Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.
In fact, these social entrepreneurs want to change the world and have the means to do it. However, “countless entrepreneurs are reinventing the wheel, starting new nonprofits without understanding what has been tried before or what really works,” says Steve Case in the book’s preface.
THE BOOK’S BIG IDEA: The key is finding ways to leverage other sectors to create extraordinary impact. Great nonprofits are catalysts; they transform the system around them to achieve the greater good. In order to create systemic change, nonprofits need to partner with government, business, individuals, and other nonprofits to achieve more than they could alone. They constantly need to adapt to their environment to stay relevant. They share leadership and power within and beyond their organizations, empowering others to become forces for good.
“Greatness has more to do with how nonprofits work outside the boundaries of their organizations than how they manage their own internal operations. At its core, social entrepreneurship is an externally focused act. It’s all about results, not processes. And that’s why it sometimes looks so messy and chaotic from the outside. The solutions to society’s most pressing problems lie in the collective, not in any single institution.”
After years of research, the authors have come up with six practices of high-impact nonprofits which they believe benefit both philanthropists and nonprofits:
- Work with government and advocate for policy change
- Harness market forces and see business as a powerful partner
- Convert individual supporters into evangelists for the cause
- Build and nurture nonprofit networks, treating other groups as allies
- Adapt to the changing environment
- Share leadership, empowering others to be forces for good
On pages 214-223, the authors provide checklists for each of the 6 areas above, to encourage readers to put the ideas into practice. I’m using these checklists at Kinnovation on our next project. These include:
- Advocate and Serve. Kinnovation is an advocate for standard impact measures and will help facilitate their adoption.
- Make Markets Work. Our partnership with business recognizes the need for business to make a profit. Kinnovation projects will help get our business alliance partners into new markets. Kinnovation itself will tap into business models that will allow it to become self-sustaining in a reasonable amount of time.
- Inspire Evangelists. Our work with Halftimers is part of our core mission. We help individuals find their calling and multiply their results as part of our mission. Our vision is to tap into a persons core passions and calling, not his checkbook. We help nonprofits and help fulfill the Calling of individuals simultaneously.
- Nurture nonprofit networks. We chose the name Kinnovation Alliance to highlight the core vision of creating a nonprofit network strategy. We believe in collaboration, knowledge sharing, and coalition building. Beyond that, our mission is to build the IT tools to enable this.
- Master the Art of Adaptation. Kinnovation is a group that thrives in innovation, experimentation, and vetting ideas. We work like a VC and idea incubator. Our core competency is technology and our mission it to enable the knowledge of our alliance partners to be captured, shared, and used.
- Share Leadership. Our board is a group of individuals from various sectors. Our core philosophy is “There is no limit to what can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit”
Since Kinnovation is catalyst and its very nature is to harness the power of existing networks of individuals, business, government and nonprofits (see figure 1.1)
Bottom line: To win at the social game game, it’s not about being the biggest or the fastest or even the best-managed nonprofit. The most powerful, influential and strategic organizations transform others to become forces for good.