Dear Friends,

The whole conversation is important for organisation to grow and society to develop.

I just want to brief you from my side about my work -

I am in the Non -profit sector since 1986 and I worked two major institutions as a beginner, volunteered(9years) and as an employee for 4years and the learnings I recieved made me move and experiment with my ideas and the floor I created is Life-Health Reinforcement Group(founded in 1999) -

Friends - my observations are -

1. Transparency within the sector is major requirement. 2.Translation of ideiology requires good documentation. 3.Deviation from purpose for which it was initiated dilutes credibility. 4.Getting back to history helps build future. 5.Defining boundaries helps in sustaining initiatives.

These I did for the organisation I established-Life-HRG.

But when I am reading your 1,2 & 3 segments -

the question I am getting are -

a)Are you addressing only major NGO's. b)Is it necessary to advocate. c)Participation for funding shouldn't it happen naturally.

From my experience in innovation - I do it because of the gut feeling that it's going to work. I think I will stop thinking differently when I start calculating.

I see this work in social innovation is all about a silent protest(disagreement) for what is going on.

If the power houses are able to translate their energies for overall development, then I dont think we would be living with increaing # of uncertainities.

I see these are the requirements for building beautiful future -

1)Be small. 2)Be Available 3)Do what you say 4)Do experiment 5)Share what you have learned (unconditionally) 6)Learn 7)Write 8)Reflect 9)Keep SMILE on everytime.

Just quick thoughts and thanks for creating this floor.

-surya prakash.

Surya,

First, congrats on your work with the Health Group - it sounds like you're making progress. You pose some excellent questions about our work, and have added some "best practices" of your own to the list. In response to your specific questions: A) Are we addressing only major NGOS? No, however, we only studied major NGOs founded between 1965-1994 in the US. We were interested in how small organizations scaled their social impact - sometimes this required scaling in size as well, and other times these organizations remained relatively small (compared to the rest of our sample.) So this led us to study groups that had at least $10m in annual revenues, and we set other age/ geographic parameters around our research (see appendix for details!). However, as we've toured the country and begun to talk to local nonprofit leaders about our work, we believe many of our "practices" apply to local nonprofits as well. You can remain small and still seek to influence local government and business, to engage individuals as evangelists, to collaborate with other nonprofits, to adapt and lead in your community, etc. We welcome stories of how smaller oragnizations are adapating and applying these success practices. B) It isn't necessary to advocate, but it might help your organization have more impact. Many of the groups we studied didn't start out doing policy advocacy, but moved into it over time because they realized they needed to influence larger government systems in order to either sustain or increase their impact. If they only continued to serve, they weren't necessarily addressing problems on a larger scale. Each organization needs to evaluate if and when they want to become involved in advocacy. It isn't for everyone but we do believe it's an important lever for increasing impact and systems-change. C) I'm not sure I understand the question on participation for funding...perhaps you could clarify.

Lastly, I just wanted to comment on some of your noted practices for "building a beautiful future"--you specifically touch on experimenting, learning, reflecting, and then sharing what you've learned. We'd whole-heartedly agree: the best nonprofits are not only innovative and adaptive, but they continually learn and reflect on how much impact they are having, and modify their programs to continue to increase their impact over time. This is all covered in our chapter on "Mastering the Art of Adapation." We also believe that the best leaders in the sector take a more open-source approach to sharing knowledge and information; they share their lessons learned with others, as illustrated in the chapter on "Nurturing Nonprofit Networks."

Thanks again for sharing some of your lessons learned with us!

Grant, funding I was talking in the context of community based initiatives and sustainibility. What I experienced is that community starts owning activities when we consistently deliver and the sustained participation occurs only when you are available.

I love to get a copy of your book. How do I go about?.

Thank you. Surya Prakash.

Surya,

Thanks for clarifying comment about fundraising. We'd agree that the community needs to own the activities, and that to be sustainable great nonprofits find ways to engage their supporters and build entire communities of evangelists for their cause. This often coincides with building an individual donor base as well.

You can order the book on Amazon.com, or through your local independent bookstore (if in the US; you may need to request it.) Amazon should ship internationally. Thanks!

I'm a advocate of the Good to Great for the Social Sector and have incorporate those ideas and many others on your list in the work I've been doing for the last 15 years (http://www.tutormentorconnection.org). Here's a graphic that I use to illustrate the role of leaders in connecting their networks to a cause: http://www.tutormentorexchange.net/Partner/CC/Presentations/Leaders/pictures_history.htm

In this graphic I refer to a book titled The Spider and the Starfish, (http://www.starfishandspider.com/index.php?title=About_the_Book ) which illustrates a role of leaders and catalyst in decentralized organizations.

In your book to you differientiate between leaders of movements (starfish), vis leaders of organizations (spiders) and talk about leaders who support both (blended)?

I think that one of the elements of success is "luck". While it's valuable to profile those who have reached success, how many with good ideas did not reach the same scale of success because they were not fortunate enough to find champions who came on board to support them? For instance, Ashoka supports a few people each year, but how many great ideas were not lucky enough, to be included in their support?

Thanks for your remarks and links. In the book we actually cite Jim Collin's work in both Good to Great, and the monograph on the Social Sectors, several times - his work has definitely been influential, and we think his findings are a great complement to ours. He focuses more on internal management practices, and our findings suggest the need to also work outside your four walls to engage and leverage other sectors, and to build social movements.

Additionally, you mention the Spider and Starfish book - which I'd highly recommend. We actually quote the authors in our chapter on Networks, and both are alumni of the Stanford GSB, where I did my graduate work as well. To your point, I think these nonprofit leaders and networks are really hybrids

they straddle the sphere between pure movements (without orgnazied infrastructure) and pure organizations. In fact, the examples from Habitat for Humanity throughout our book underscore this tension between building a movement and building an organization. Ultimately, we think you need to both -- it's not an either/or proposition. Great nonprofits build movements and engage other sectors, but they also build organizations (ableit relatively flat, decentralized ones!) to sustain those movements.

As for the comment on luck - no doubt it plays some role. However, I'd argue that the great social entrepreneurs of our time "create their own luck." They are highly strategic and adept at engaging others and creating opportunities where others only see barriers. Wendy Kopp is a fabulous example. She plowed away at her idea, leveraging every possible contact she had early on to raise the seed funding to make her dream of Teach for America a reality

is that luck, or is it strategic thinking coupled with real tenacity? Millard Fuller and Habitat are another example - you could say they were lucky to get Jimmy Carter involved early on, and certainly his engagement made a huge difference to that organization -- but Millard was also highly strategic about pursuing and inviting him; the fact that Habitat was just up the road from Carter's boyhood home certainly didn't hurt!

With respect to harnessing creative energy, developing strategies and remaining adaptabile, what are some best practices? Do social impact organizations ever use venture approaches? I.e. ideation session leads to development of portfolio of strategies, each are given some time, mgmt and funding and the one that gets most traction gets more resources? Or does that approach confuse the mission, donors, etc? Additionally, how, if at all cam impact organizations best use innovation or management consultancies to "test" ideas before over allocating resources toward something that won't work or has failed in the past? (Clearly forums like this are helpful in avoiding wasted efforts, but can previously rejected approaches find new life under the right leaders?) Do any of the funding organizations - Ashoka, etc - offer meaningful consulting, training, etc?

I think that if business or non profit leaders can harness concepts of knowledge managment as part of a process of creativity and innovation, they can move toward better solutions on a more consistent basis, if they can find the resources to fuel their ideas. In a section of my web site I host links to web sites that demonstrate these concepts: http://www.tutormentorconnection.org/TMLearningNetwork/LinksLibrary/tabid/560/rrcid/13/rrscid/24/rrpid/1/rrepp/20/Default.aspx

My goal is that people I'm trying to help, and people in my own organization, learn to use these concepts in their on-going work.

Heather mentioned that she's a graduate of the Stanford University GSB and that luck is earned. I participate in forums like this with a goal of creating my luck. I've started a Business School Connection idea in a forum of the T/MC site and hope to attract one or two people from Stanford and other top business schools who might be interested in a project that taps the talent of business schools around the country, with a goal of creating on-going resources for tutor/mentor programs in the cities where the universities are located. http://www.tutormentorconnection.org/GetInvolved/DiscussionForums/tabid/474/view/topics/forumid/116/Default.aspx

The last volunteer I had working on this was from the University of Chicago GSB. It's a simple idea, but could revolutionize the way hundreds of non profits are supported. If a venture philanthropist looked at this idea, would they sponsor it and help make it a reality?

Thanks for your comments, Dan. I have a personal passion for knowledge management in the social sector - my husband did his PhD on this topic (in manufacturing companies), and having both worked at McKinsey for awhile we talk about the need for more knowledge management strategies and systems in this sector. Right now most of the information shared is either within organizations (i.e. across networks, which we discuss a bit in that chapter); or internally within a foundation for example. The knowledge that is shared more globally is through conferences and often in-person; or sometimes through magazines like SSIR and websites like SocialEdge. These are all a good start, but I think we can push the field further. Thanks for providing your link.

Speaking of Stanford GSB, I was just informed taht our podcast on the CSI Social Innovation Conversations website has received 7,000 downloads! It's an excerpt from a speech at the SSIR-AFP conference on 3 of the 6 practices. If you're interested, you can find it at: http://sic.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3319.html

To quickly respond to your comments, we do talk briefly about various processes to vet ideas internally at some of the 12 high-impact nonprofits we write about. Self-Help uses a fairly lose model, mapping potential impact against mission; Share Our Strength borrowed from the McKinsey play-book and developed an internal "business plan" type competition, where good ideas are developed and put through a number of tests before advancing to execution. Their COO Pat Nicklin was instrumental in bringing more rigor to the process. Other groups like Env. Defense and Heritage use strategic planning processes to decide where to focus their energy and resources. Every group uses different tools, but they have all found a way to balance some structure with creativity and innovation. The idea of using management consultants to test ideas is a good one - not sure any of these groups have done that, though many use external consultants to lead strategic planning. I like the idea of a portfolio approach. Clearly this is an area ripe for additional research and studying best practices. There doesn't seem to be a "one size fits all" approach.

Greetings Leslie and Heather,

First of all, congratulations on the book! Your findings are entirely consistent with my own experiences, so I've been recommending it to everyone I know in our sector lately.

I wholeheartedly agree that "Adaptability encompasses the unique ability to balance creativity and innovation with disciplined systems and business planning processes." The organization I run, Global Gain, emphasizes exactly this through a number of existing "process innovations" we're trying to advocate throughout the sector. We also hope to co-create and advocate new ones with others that can make the sector more open, collaborative, and innovative.

Interestingly enough, "Adaptive Blueprinting" is the name of the process we've been training social entrepreneurs in up to this point. Essentially, the process teaches SEs how to scale-out the impact of their most successful program-models by creating and packaging blueprints designed with enough structure to sufficiently guide partners while including enough flexibility to allow for local adaptation.

It's also worth noting that the process specifically addresses one of the questions you pose above-- how to help founders ease off the reigns and share power. We basically teach that as social entrepreneurs, our main goal should always be expanding impact and that in order to to do so, selflessness is a necessary ingredient. If it's not, then you're not actually a social entrepreneur.

In an effort to practice walk our own talk, our next goal is to put together a train-the-trainer program to help networks of social entrepreneurs like Ashoka, Echoing Green, Unltd and large foundations put together their own workshops on Adaptive Blueprinting as well as other process innovations which encourage systematic collaboration and innovation. (Leslie, you may be interested to know that we conducted a workshop on Adaptive Blueprinting for 15 Ashoka Fellows and 5 staff in New Delhi. There was a consensus on the importance of adaptability and selflessness, so this is encouraging.)

My point in sharing all of this is to show that in my experience, Forces for Good is right on target. I think social entrepreneurs who are on the cutting edge already "get it", though, we certainly need more works like yours to "hammer it home" and provide illustrative cases that can help guide the way.

Kudos again on the book and all the great praise and publicity it's received. It's definitely well-deserved!

Nathan Cryder (Cofounder and ED of Global Gain)