Innovation Sociale et Entrepreneuriat Social

We’ve learned a lot from our work helping large-scale nonprofits find ways to create social innovation at scale. As we’ve explored in the last five posts, we’ve helped them reconnect with their core purpose and realign their network around shared goals, and in the process, we’ve worked with them to reinvent their organizations, business models and brands. Looking across all of these cases, our single most important lesson learned is that this work is most effective when approached holistically, because every part of the system is interconnected. If you fix only a nonprofit’s strategy but don’t realign the organization around new goals for impact (including structure, talent, and governance), the new strategy has a poor chance of being implemented. If you tinker with the structure without establishing a north star, the nonprofit will be held back by its lack of strategic focus. If you help the group do better tactical fundraising without increased and sustained social impact, financial improvement will be short-lived. And, if you only tinker with an organization’s “brand promise,” you’re helping the nonprofit sell something that it can’t deliver on, and clients and supporters will quickly become disillusioned. All of these pieces need to be updated and changed together.