June 2011

This year’s Social Impact Exchange conference was a great opportunity to bring people together from traditional philanthropy and donor advised funds, as well as high net worth individuals, to engage in a dialogue about the complex issues that are inherent in trying to drive innovation and impact. We’ve walked away better able to understand how we scale promising innovation. We recognize the solutions that we’re all trying to work toward require us to enter into strategic collaborations with many different kinds of partners. We cannot scale something on our own.

The quality of a nonprofit’s board can make or break the nonprofit, an often overlooked reality. Gone are the days – if they ever existed – of board membership as a feel-good sinecure. Gone, too, are the days when board membership was like a Supreme Court.

It’s marketing 101: Emphasize the benefits to the consumers, not the benefit you gain by selling to them.

So, too, with philanthropists and high-net-worth individuals, according to panelists addressing Engaging Philanthropists and Opening New Channels and Sources of Growth Capital at the 2011 Social Impact Exchange’s Conference On Scaling Impact.

Imagine: Waking up to find that your access to Google products has been severed … forever.  Google search is dead. No access to Google docs. No gmail. You’ve put your eggs in the Google basket and now they’re all broken.

It happened to my colleague June 8.

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a 7-part series on Developing A Growth Business Plan. The series is based on presentations made at the Social Impact Exchange Symposium on Scaling Impact held June 14 and on the experiences of nonprofits that participated in the business plan competition.

The more a nonprofit learns from successful business practices, the more likely it is to be successful, according to Brad Joutras, director of development for Reading in Motion (RIM), one the competitors in the Social Impact Exchange (SIEx) 2011 Business Plan competition.

It may seem like that dreadful “overhead,” but using an intermediary to put together funding options for scaling a nonprofit … well, it’s an investment in expertise, not a frivolous expense.

That was the point very clearly made by the panel, Intermediaries and Impact: How Can We Make Our Philantrhopic Dollars Go Further By Leveraging the Work of Intermediaries? at the 2011 Social Impact Exchange’s Conference On Scaling Impact.

Unlocking growth capital, now there’s a challenge, one addressed by a knowledgeable panel at the 2011 Social Impact Exchange’s Conference On Scaling Impact.

Foundations don’t invest enough for nonprofits to succeed, according to Kelly Fitzsimmons, chief program and strategy office for the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. The missing links:

• money to experiment and learn,
• money for capacity-building.

It’s a point made at last year’s conference as well but one well worth repeating.

Number crunchers love them; the rest of us are intimidated by them.

Analytics and metrics for social media are so bountiful as to be either a feast or overwhelming, depending on your attitude toward numbers. But the one thing they are not is insufficient.

I think they got it! Two items this week give me confidence that there’s been a sea change in corporate thinking: The planet and the customer now count. It’s a business model that small businesses can profit from as well.

Back in ‘05 or so, Walmart got on the green bandwagon, designing greener packaging, cleaning up its supply chain, and generally opting for sustainability. It did not do this to help the environment; it wanted to improve its bottom line. And it succeeded.